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ASPECTS  OF  FICTION 


IBooks  by  Grander  {Matthews  : 

Essays  and  Criticisms 

French  Dramatists  of  the  19th  Century 

Pen  and  Ink,  Essays  on  subjects  of  more 

or  less  importance 

Aspects  of  Fiction,  and  other  Essays 

The  Historical  Novel,  and  other  Essays 

Parts  of  Speech,  Essays  on  English 

The  Development   of  the  Drama  (in 

preparation) 

ASPECTS  OF  FICTION 

AND  OTHER  VENTURES  IN 
CRITICISM 


BY 

BRANDER  MATTHEWS 


THIRD  EDITION,  ENLARGED 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S   SONS 

1902 


Copyright,  1896,  by 
HARPER  &  BROTHERS 


Copyright,  1902,  by 
BRANDER  MATTHEWS 

All  rights  reserved 
Published  September,  igo* 


•  ••  ^»  ^ 
•I  •    • 


•  • 


•  •  • 


•  • 


••• 


THE  CAXTON  PRESS 
NEW  YORK. 


MH 


CONTENTS 

rAGK 

I.  American  Literature 3 

II.   Two  Studies  of  the  South  ......  25 

III.  The  Penalty  of  Humor 43 

IV.  On  Pleasing  the  Taste  of  the  Public  .    .  59 
V.   On    Certain    Parallelisms    Between    the 

Ancient  Drama  and  the  Modern    .    .  83 

VI.   The  Importance  of  the  Folk-Theatre  .    .  loi 
VII.  Two  French  Dramatic  Critics: 

I.  M.  francisque  sarcey 133 

II.    M.    JULES   LEMAITRE I53 

VIII.   Two  Scotsmen  of  Letters: 

I.    MR.    ANDREW  LANG 177 

II.    ROBERT  LOUIS   STEVENSON 203 

IX.  Aspects  of  Fiction: 

I.    THE   gift  of  story-telling       ....  21$ 

II.    CERVANTES,    ZOLA,    KIPLING  &  CO.    .      .      .  236 

III.  THE  PROSE  TALES  OF  M.  FRANCOIS  COPPEE  256 

IV.  THE     SHORT     STORIES      OF     M.      LUDOVIC 

HALEVY 270 

V.    MR.      CHARLES      DUDLEY      WARNER     AS     A 

WRITER  OF   FICTION 280 


^25341 


AMERICAN   LITERATURE 


[This  address  was  delivered  before  the  National  Educational 
Association,  at  Buffalo,  July  8,  1896."! 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

The  history  of  mankind  is  little  more  than 
the  list  of  the  civilizations  that  have  arisen  one 
on  the  ruin  of  the  other,  the  Roman  supplant- 
ing the  Greek,  as  the  Assyrian  had  been  ousted 
by  the  Babylonian.  The  life  of  each  of  these 
successive  civilizations  was  proportioned  to 
the  vitality  of  the  ideas  by  which  it  was  ani- 
mated ;  and  we  cannot  estimate  it  or  even  under- 
stand it  except  in  so  far  as  we  are  able  to  grasp 
these  underlying  principles.  What  the  ideas 
were  which  dominated  these  vanished  civiliza- 
tions it  is  for  us  to  discover  for  ourselves  as 
best  we  may  by  a  study  of  all  the  records  they 
left  behind  them,  and  especially  by  a  reverent 
examination  of  their  laws,  their  arts,  and  their 
writings  in  so  far  as  these  have  been  preserved 
to  us.  Of  all  these  relics  of  peoples  now  dead 
and  gone,  none  is  so  instructive  as  literature, 
and  none  is  so  interesting;  by  its  aid  we  are 
enabled  to  reconstruct  the  past,  as  we  are  also 
helped  to  understand  the  present. 


•  •  •  •  •      .     • 

ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 


Of  the  literatures  which  thus  explain  to  us 
our  fellow-man  as  he  was  and  as  he  is,  three 
seem  to  me  pre-eminent,  standing  out  and 
above  the  others  not  only  by  reason  of  the 
greater  number  of  men  of  genius  who  have 
illustrated  them,  but  also  by  reason  of  their 
own  more  persistent  strength  and  their  own 
broader  variety.  These  three  literatures  are 
the  Greek,  the  French,  and  the  English. 

There  are  great  names  in  the  other  modern 
languages,  no  doubt — the  names  of  Dante  and 
of  Cervantes  and  of  Goethe,  than  which,  in- 
deed, there  are  none  greater.  In  French  litera- 
ture, however,  and  in  English  there  are  not 
wanting  names  as  mighty  as  these.  Fortunate- 
ly, the  possession  of  genius  is  not  the  privilege 
of  any  one  language,  of  any  one  country,  or 
of  any  one  century.  Where  French  literature 
and  English  can  claim  superiority  over  Italian, 
Spanish,  and  German  is  rather  in  sustaining 
a  higher  average  of  excellence  for  a  longer  pe- 
riod of  time.  The  literature  of  the  Italian  lan- 
guage, of  the  Spanish,  and  of  the  German  has 
no  such  beadroU  of  writers  of  the  first  rank  as 
illustrates  the  literature  of  the  French  and  of 
the  English. 

There  is  perhaps  no  more  manly  instrument 
of  precision   than   the  Latin  language,  none 


AMERICAN    LITERATURE  5 

which  better  repays  the  struggle  for  its  mastery ; 
but  Latin  literature,  if  not  second-rate,  when 
tried  by  the  loftiest  standards,  is  at  least  sec- 
ondary, being  transplanted  from  Greece  and 
lacking  resolute  roots  in  its  own  soil.  Nor  is 
any  dispute  possible  as  to  the  high  value  of 
Hebrew  literature ;  as  Coleridge  declared  with 
characteristic  insight,  "  sublimity  is  Hebrew  by 
birth  ";  but  Hebrew  literature  has  not  the  wide 
range  of  the  Greek,  nor  its  impeccable  beauty. 

"  Art  is  only  form,"  said  Georges  Sand ;  and 
Goethe  declared  that  the  "highest  operation 
of  art  is  form-giving."  If  we  accept  these  say- 
ings there  is  no  need  to  dwell  on  the  supreme 
distinction  of  Greek  literature,  for  it  is  only  in 
Greek  that  we  find  the  undying  perfection  of 
form.  It  is  there  only  that  we  have  clear  and 
deep  thought  always  beautifully  embodied. 
Indeed,  truth  and  beauty  govern  Greek  litera- 
ture so  absolutely  that,  old  as  it  is,  it  seems  to 
us  ever  fresh  and  eternally  young.  After  two 
thousand  years  and  more  it  strikes  us  to-day 
as  startlingly  modern.  Thoreau — whose  own 
phrase  was  often  Attic  in  its  delicate  precision 
— Thoreau  asked,  **  What  are  the  classics  but 
the  noblest  recorded  thoughts  of  man  ?  They 
are  the  only  oracles  that  are  not  decayed." 

Nevertheless,  the  world  has  kept  restlessly 


6  ASPECTS   OP   FICTION 

moving  since  the  fall  of  Athens,  and  mankind 
has  developed  needs  that  the  Greeks  knew  not. 
As  Moli^re  puts  it  pithily,  "  The  ancients  are 
the  ancients,  and  we  are  the  men  of  to-day." 
There  are  questions  in  America  now,  and  not 
a  few  of  them,  undreamed  of  in  Sparta ;  and 
for  the  answers  to  these  it  is  vain  to  go  to 
Greek  literature,  modern  as  it  may  be  in  so 
many  ways. 

French  literature  has  not  a  little  of  the  mod- 
eration and  of  the  charm  of  Greek  literature. 
It  is  not  violent ;  it  is  not  boisterous,  even  ;  it 
is  never  freakish.  It  has  balance  and  order 
and  a  broad  sanity.  It  has  an  unfailing  sense 
of  style.  It  has  lightness  of  touch,  and  it  has 
also  and  always  intellectual  seriousness.  The 
literature  is  like  the  language ;  and  Voltaire 
declared  that  what  was  not  clear  was  not 
French.  And  the  language  itself  is  the  fit  in- 
strument of  the  people  who  use  it  and  who 
have  refined  it  for  their  needs — a  people  logi- 
cal beyond  all  others,  gifted  in  mathematics, 
devoid  of  hypocrisy,  law-abiding,  governed  by 
the  social  instinct,  inheritors  of  the  Latin  tra- 
dition and  yet  infused  with  the  Celtic  spirit. 

To  those  of  us  who  are  controlled  by  the 
Anglo-Saxon  ideals,  whether  or  not  we  come 
of  English  stock,  to  those  of  us  who  adhere  to 


AMERICAN   LITERATURE  7 

Anglo-Saxon  conventions,  no  other  literature 
can  serve  as  a  better  corrective  of  our  inherited 
tendencies  than  the  French.  The  chief  char- 
acteristic of  English  literature  is  energy,  power 
often  ill-restrained,  vigor  often  superabundant. 
From  the  earliest  rude  war-songs  of  the  stal- 
wart Saxon  fighters  who  were  beginning  to 
make  the  English  language,  to  the  latest  short 
story  setting  forth  the  strife  of  an  American 
mining  camp,  there  is  never  any  lack  of  force 
in  English  literature.  There  is  always  the 
Teutonic  boldness  and  rudeness — the  Teutonic 
readiness  to  push  forward  and  to  shoulder  the 
rest  of  the  world  out  of  the  way — the  Teutonic 
independence  that  leads  every  man  to  fight  for 
his  own  hand,  like  the  smith  in  Scott's  story. 
What  we  do  not  discover  in  English  literature, 
with  all  its  overmastering  vitality,  is  economy 
of  effort,  the  French  self-control,  the  Greek 
sense  of  form. 

French  literature  and  English  literature  have 
existed  side  by  side  for  many  centuries,  each 
of  them  influencing  the  other  now  and  again, 
and  yet  each  of  them  preserving  its  own  indi- 
viduality always,  and  ever  revealing  the  domi- 
nant characteristics  of  the  people  speaking  its 
language.  We  need  not  attempt  to  weigh 
them  one  against  the  other,  and  to  measure 


8  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

them  with  a  foot-rule,  and  to  declare  which  is 
the  greater.  Equal  they  may  be  in  the  past 
and  in  the  present ;  equal  in  the  future  they 
are  not  likely  to  be.  The  qualities  which  make 
French  literature  what  it  is  tend  also  to  keep 
the  French  race  from  expansion ;  just  as  the 
qualities  which  make  English  literature  what 
it  is  have  sent  the  English-speaking  stock  forth 
to  fill  up  the  waste  places  of  the  earth,  and  to 
wrest  new  lands  from  hostile  savages  or  from 
inhospitable  nature. 

French  was  the  language  of  the  courts  of 
Europe  when  English  was  little  better  than  a 
dialect  of  rough  islanders.  When  Chaucer 
chose  his  native  English  as  the  vehicle  of  his 
verse,  he  showed  both  courage  and  prescience 
— a  courage  and  a  prescience  lacking  in  Bacon, 
who  lived  two  hundred  years  later,  and  who 
did  not  feel  himself  insured  against  Time  until 
his  great  work  was  safely  entombed  in  Latin. 
Even  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury there  were  more  men  and  women  in  the 
world  speaking  French  than  there  were  speak- 
ing English.  But  now  at  the  end  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  with  the  steady  spread  of  our 
stock  into  the  four  quarters  of  the  world,  there 
are  more  than  twice  as  many  people  using 
English  as  there  are  using  French. 


AMERICAN   LITERATURE  9 

And  the  end  is  not  yet,  for  while  four-fifths 
of  those  who  have  French  for  their  mother- 
tongue  abide  in  France  or  along  its  borders, 
not  a  third  of  those  who  have  English  for 
their  mother-tongue  dwell  in  England.  Not 
only  in  England,  Ireland,  and  Scotland  is 
English  spoken,  and  in  all  the  many  British 
colonies  which  encompass  the  globe  about — it 
is  also  the  native  speech  of  the  people  of  the 
United  States.  English  is  the  language  of  the 
stock  which  bids  fair  to  prove  itself  the  most 
masterful,  hardy,  and  prolific,  and  which  seems 
to  possess  a  marvellous  faculty  for  assimilating 
members  of  other  allied  stems  and  of  getting 
these  newly  received  elements  to  accept  its 
own  hereditary  ideals. 

English  literature  is  likely,  therefore,  to  be- 
come in  the  future  relatively  more  important 
and  absolutely  more  influential.  As  there  has 
been  no  relaxing  of  energy  among  the  peoples 
that  now  speak  the  English  language,  probably 
there  will  be  no  alteration  of  the  chief  charac- 
teristic of  English  literature,  although  in  time 
the  changes  of  environment  must  make  more 
or  less  modification  inevitable.  It  will  be  cu- 
rious to  see  in  a  century  how  the  ideals  and 
the  practices  of  the  race  will  alter,  after  the 
race  is  no  longer  pent  up  in  an  island,  after  it 


to  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

has  scattered  itself  over  the  world  and  assim- 
ilated other  elements  and  adjusted  itself  to 
other  social  organizations.  Here  in  America 
we  can  see  already  some  of  these  results,  for 
already  is  the  American  differentiated  from 
the  Englishman.  We  may  not  be  able  to 
declare  clearly  wherein  the  difference  consists ; 
but  we  all  recognize  it  plainly  enough. 

Colonel  Higginson  has  suggested  that  the 
American  has  an  added  drop  more  of  nervous 
fluid  than  the  Englishman.  It  is  perhaps  ap- 
parent already  that  the  American  is  swifter 
than  the  Englishman,  slighter  in  build,  spring- 
ier in  gait.  Social  changes  are  as  evident  as 
physical.  Lowell  remarked  that  if  it  was  a 
good  thing  for  an  English  duke  that  he  had  no 
social  superior,  it  surely  was  not  a  bad  thing 
for  a  Yankee  farmer.  Socially  the  American 
is  less  girt  in  by  caste  than  the  Englishman. 
These  differences,  obvious  in  life,  are  visible  also 
in  literature.  We  feel  now,  even  if  we  do  not 
care  to  define,  the  unlikeness  of  the  writing  of 
the  British  authors  to  the  writing  of  the  Amer- 
ican authors.  Neither  man  nor  nature  is  the 
same  in  Great  Britain  as  it  is  in  the  United 
States ;  and  of  necessity,  therefore,  there  cannot 
be  any  identity  between  the  points  of  view  of 
the  men  of  letters  of  the  two  countries. 


AMERICAN    LITERATURE  II 

In  time,  as  there  come  to  be  more  writers  in 
Canada,  we  shall  have  a  perspective  from  yet 
another  point  of  view;  and  in  due  season 
others  will  be  presented  to  us  from  Australia 
and  from  India.  No  doubt  these  future  authors 
will  cherish  the  tradition  of  English  literature 
as  loyally  as  we  Americans  cherish  it  here  in 
the  United  States — as  loyally  as  the  British 
cherish  it  in  the  little  group  of  islands  which 
was  once  the  home  of  the  ancestors  of  us  all. 
Race  characteristics  are  inexorable,  and  it  is 
very  unlikely  that  there  will  ever  be  any  ir- 
reconcilable divergence  between  these  sepa- 
rate divisions  of  the  English-speaking  peoples. 
English  literature  will  continue  to  flourish  as 
sturdily  as  ever  after  the  parent  stem  has 
parted  into  five  branches.  All  of  these  branches 
will  take  the  same  pride  in  their  descent  from 
a  common  stock  and  in  their  possession  of  a 
common  literature  and  of  a  common  language. 
A  common  language,  I  say,  for  the  English 
language  belongs  to  all  those  who  use  it, 
whether  they  live  in  London  or  in  Chicago  or 
in  Melbourne. 

It  is  not  a  little  strange  that  it  should  now 
ever  be  needful  to  say  that  the  British  have  no 
more  ownership  of  the  English  language  than 
we  Americans  have.     The  English  language  is 


12  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

the  mother-tongue  of  the  inhabitants  of  the 
British  Isles,  but  so  is  it  also  the  mother-tongue 
of  the  inhabitants  of  the  United  States.  It  is 
not  a  loan  to  us,  which  may  be  recalled ;  it  is 
not  a  gift,  which  we  have  accepted ;  it  is  a 
heritage,  which  we  derived  from  our  fore- 
fathers. We  hold  it  by  right  of  birth,  and  our 
title  to  it  is  just  as  good  as  the  title  of  our  kin 
across  the  sea.  No  younger  brother's  portion 
is  it  that  we  claim  in  the  English  language,  but 
a  whole  and  undivided  half.  It  is  an  American 
possession  as  it  is  a  British  possession,  no  more 
and  no  less ;  and  we  hold  it  on  the  same  terms 
that  our  cousins  do.  We  have  the  rights  of 
ownership,  and  the  responsibilities  also,  exactly 
as  they  have  and  to  exactly  the  same  extent. 
The  English  language  belongs  to  us  also ;  it  is 
ours  to  use  as  we  please,  just  as  the  common 
law  is  ours,  to  modify  according  to  our  own 
needs;  it  is  ours  for  us  to  keep  pure  and 
healthy ;  and  it  is  ours  for  us  to  hand  down  to 
our  children  unimpaired  in  strength  and  in 
subtlety. 

And  as  the  language  is  a  possession  common 
to  all  the  English-speaking  peoples,  so  also  is 
the  literature.  A  share  in  the  fame  of  Chaucer 
and  of  Shakespeare,  of  Milton  and  of  Dryden, 
is  part  of  the  inheritance  of  every  one  of  us 


AMERICAN    LITERATURE  13 

who  has  English  for  his  mother-tongue,  what- 
ever his  father-land.  If  there  be  anywhere  a 
great  poet  or  novelist  or  historian,  it  matters 
not  where  his  birth  or  his  residence  or  what 
his  nationality,  if  he  makes  use  of  the  English 
language  he  is  contributing  to  English  litera- 
ture. To  distinguish  the  younger  divisions  of 
English  literature  from  the  elder,  we  shall  have 
to  call  that  elder  division  British ;  meaning 
thereby  that  portion  of  our  common  literature 
which  is  now  produced  by  those  who  were  left 
behind  in  the  old  home  when  the  rest  of  the 
family  went  forth  one  by  one  to  make  their 
way  in  the  world.  Thus  English  literature, 
which  was  one  and  undivided  till  the  end  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  has  now  in  the  nine- 
teenth century  two  chief  divisions — British  and 
American ;  and  it  bids  fair  in  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury to  have  three  more — Canadian,  Austra- 
lian, and  Indian. 

Some  such  distinction  between  the  several 
existing  divisions  of  the  English  literature  of 
our  own  time  is  needful,  and  it  will  be  found 
useful.  Absurd  and  very  misleading  is  the 
antithesis  sometimes  made  between  American 
literature  and  English,  since  the  American  is 
but  one  of  the  divisions  of  the  English  litera- 
ture of  our  time.    Not  long  ago  a  pupil  of  one 


14  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

of  the  best  private  schools  in  New  York  main- 
tained that  American  literature  is  just  as  im- 
portant as  English  literature,  producing  in 
proof  two  companion  manuals,  of  the  same 
size  externally,  although  of  course  internally 
on  a  wholly  different  scale.  Such  a  lack  of 
proportion  in  the  treatment  of  different  parts 
of  the  literature  of  the  English  language  is 
foolish  and  harmful.  But  a  comparison  of 
American  literature  with  the  merely  British 
literature  of  to-day  might  be  proper  enough. 
What  we  need  to  grasp  clearly  is  the  fact  that 
the  stream  of  English  literature  had  only  one 
channel  until  the  end  of  the  last  century,  and 
that  in  this  century  it  has  two  channels.  The 
new  mouth  that  this  massive  current  has  made 
for  itself  is  American ; — and  so  we  are  com- 
pelled to  call  the  old  mouth  British. 

Through  which  of  these  channels  the  fuller 
stream  shall  flow  in  the  next  century  no  man 
can  foretell  to-day.  It  is  a  fact  that  the  popu- 
lation of  these  United  States  is  now  nearly 
twice  as  large  as  the  population  of  the  British 
Isles,  and  not  inferior  in  ability  or  in  energy. 
But  it  is  a  fact  also  that  in  America  a  smaller 
proportion  of  the  ability  and  the  energy  of  the 
people  seems  to  be  devoted  to  the  cause  of 
letters.     In  a  new  country  life  itself  offers  the 


AMERICAN    LITERATURE  1 5 

widest  opportunities ;  and  literature  here  has 
keener  rivals  and  more  of  them  than  it  can 
have  in  a  land  which  has  been  cleared  and 
tilled  and  tended  since  a  time  whereof  the 
memory  of  man  runneth  not  to  the  contrary. 
The  earliest  Americans  had  other  duties  than 
the  writing  of  books :  they  had  to  lay  deep  the 
broad  foundations  of  this  mighty  nation.  It 
was  more  than  two  hundred  years  after  the 
establishment  of  the  first  trading-post  on  the 
island  of  Manhattan  when  Washington  Irving 
published  the  '  Sketch  Book,'  the  first  work 
of  American  authorship  to  win  a  wide  popu- 
larity beyond  the  borders  of  our  own  country 
— before  Fenimore  Cooper  a  little  later  pub- 
lished the  '  Spy,'  the  first  work  of  American 
authorship  to  win  a  wide  popularity  beyond 
the  borders  of  our  own  language.  We  may 
say  that  American  literature  is  now  but  little 
older  than  the  threescore  years  and  ten  allot- 
ted as  the  span  of  a  man's  natural  life. 

We  had  had  authors,  it  is  true,  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  and  at  least  two  of  these, 
Jonathan  Edwards  and  Benjamin  Franklin, 
hold  high  rank  ;  but  it  was  not  until  towards 
the  end  of  the  first  quarter  of  the  nineteenth 
century  that  we  began  really  to  have  a  litera- 
ture.    It  is  scarcely  an  overstatement  to  say 


1 6  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

that  there  are  men  alive  to-day  who  are  as  old 
as  American  literature  is.  But  in  the  past 
three-quarters  of  a  century  American  litera- 
ture has  taken  root  firmly  and  blossomed 
forth  abundantly  and  spread  itself  abroad 
sturdily.  Emerson  followed  Edwards  and 
Franklin.  Hawthorne  and  Poe  came  after 
Irving  and  Cooper.  Bryant  proved  that  Nat- 
ure here  in  America  was  fit  for  the  purposes 
of  Art ;  and  he  was  succeeded  by  Longfellow 
and  Lowell,  by  Whittier  and  Holmes. 

During  these  same  threescore  years  and  ten 
there  were  great  writers  in  the  other  branch 
of  the  literature  of  our  language,  in  British 
literature,  perhaps  greater  writers  than  there 
were  here  in  America,  and  of  a  certainty  there 
were  more  of  them.  There  is  no  need  now 
to  call  the  roll  of  the  mighty  men  of  letters 
alive  in  England  at  the  middle  of  this  century. 
But  much  as  we  admire  these  British  authors, 
much  as  we  respect  them,  I  do  not  think  that 
they  are  as  close  to  us  as  the  authors  of  our 
own  country ;  we  do  not  cherish  them  with 
the  same  affection.  Just  as  the  modern  lit- 
eratures are  nearer  to  us  than  the  ancient, 
because  we  ourselves  are  modern,  just  as 
English  literature  is  nearer  to  us  than  French, 
because  we  ourselves  speak  English,  so   the 


AMERICAN    LITERATURE  1 7 

American  division  of  that  literature  is  closer 
to  us  than  the  British.  It  helps  us  to  under- 
stand one  another,  and  it  explains  us  to  our- 
selves. If  we  accept  the  statement  that,  after 
all,  literature  is  only  a  criticism  of  life,  it  is 
of  value  in  proportion  as  its  criticism  of  life 
is  truthful.  Surely  it  needs  no  argument  to 
show  that  the  life  it  is  most  needful  for  us 
Americans  to  have  criticised  truthfully  is  our 
own  life.  It  is  only  in  our  own  literature  that 
we  can  hope  to  learn  the  truth  about  our- 
selves ;  and  this  indeed  is  what  we  must  al- 
ways insist  upon  in  our  literature — the  truth, 
the  whole  truth,  and  nothing  but  the  truth. 
Lowell  reminded  us  that  Goethe  went  to  the 
root  of  the  matter  when  he  said  that  "  people 
are  always  talking  of  the  study  of  the  ancients ; 
yet  what  does  this  mean  but  apply  yourself 
to  the  actual  world  and  seek  to  express  it, 
since  this  is  what  the  ancients  did  when  they 
were  alive  ?" 

As  we  consider  the  brief  history  of  the 
American  branch  of  English  literature,  we  can 
see  that  the  growth  of  a  healthy  feeling  in  re- 
gard to  it  has  been  hindered  by  two  unfort- 
unate failings — provincialism  and  colonialism. 
By  provincialism  I  mean  the  spirit  of  Little 
Pedlington,  the  spirit  that  makes  swans  of  all 


l8  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

our  geese.  By  colonialism  I  mean  the  atti- 
tude of  looking  humbly  towards  the  old  coun- 
try for  guidance  and  for  counsel  even  about 
our  own  affairs. 

Provincialism  is  local  pride  unduly  inflated. 
It  is  the  temper  that  is  ready  to  hail  as  a  Swan 
of  Avon  any  local  gosling  who  has  taught 
himself  to  make  an  unnatural  use  of  his  own 
quills.  It  is  always  tempting  us  to  stand  on 
tiptoe  to  proclaim  our  own  superiority.  It 
prevents  our  seeing  ourselves  in  proper  pro- 
portion to  the  rest  of  the  world.  It  leads  to 
the  preparation  of  school-manuals  in  which 
the  three-score  years  and  ten  of  American  lit- 
erature are  made  equal  in  importance  to  the 
thousand  years  of  literature  produced  in  Great 
Britain.  It  tends  to  render  a  modest  writer, 
like  Longfellow,  ridiculous  by  comparing  him 
implicitly  with  the  half-dozen  world-poets.  In 
the  final  resort,  no  doubt,  every  people  must 
be  the  judge  of  its  own  authors;  but  before 
that  final  judgment  is  rendered  every  people 
consults  the  precedents  and  measures  its  own 
local  favorites  by  the  cosmopolitan  and  eternal 
standards. 

Colonialism  is  shown  in  the  timid  deference 
towards  foreign  opinion  about  our  own  deeds 
and  in  the  unquestioning  acceptance  of  the 


AMERICAN    LITERATURE  I9 

foreign  estimate  upon  our  own  writers.  It 
might  be  defined  almost  as  a  willingness  to  be 
second-hand,  a  feeling  which  finds  satisfaction 
in  calling  Irving  the  American  Goldsmith  ; 
Cooper,  the  American  Scott ;  Bryant,  the 
American  Wordsworth;  and  Whittier,  the 
American  Burns.  Fifty  years  ago,  when  this 
silly  trick  was  far  more  prevalent  than  it  is  now, 
Lowell  satirized  it  in  the  '  Fable  for  Critics ': 

Why,  there's  scarcely  a  huddle  of  log-huts  and  shan- 
ties 
That  has  not  brought  forth  its  Miltons  and  Dantes; 
I  myself  know  ten  Byrons,  one  Coleridge,  three  Shel- 

leys. 
Two  Raphaels,  six  Titians  (I  think),  one  Apelles, 
Leonardos  and  Rubenses  plenty  as  lichens ; 
One  (but  that  one  is  plenty)  American  Dickens, 
A  whole  flock  of  Lambs,  any  number  of  Tennysons, 
In  short,  if  a  man  has  the  luck  to  have  any  sons 
He  may  feel  pretty  certain  that  one  out  of  twain 
Will  be  some  very  great  person  over  again. 

And  elsewhere  in  the  same   poem  Lowell 
protests  against  the  literature  that 

suits  each  whisper  and  motion 
To  what  will  be  thought  of  it  over  the  ocean. 

The  corrective  of   colonialism    is   a   manly 
self-respect,  a  wholesome  self-reliance,  a  wish 


20  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

to  stand  firmly  on  our  own  feet,  a  resolve  to 
survey  life  with  our  own  eyes  and  not  through 
any  imported  spectacles.  The  new  world  has 
already  brought  forth  men  of  action — Washing- 
ton, for  example,  and  Lincoln — worthy  of  com- 
parison with  the  best  that  the  old  world  has 
enrolled  on  her  records.  Has  the  new  world 
produced  any  man  of  letters  of  corresponding 
rank?  Matthew  Arnold  thought  that  there 
were  only  five  world-classics — Homer,  Dante, 
Shakespeare,  Milton,  and  Goethe.  This  seems 
a  list  unduly  scanted ;  but  it  would  need  to  be 
five  times  larger  before  it  included  a  single 
American  name.  What  of  it?  Even  if  the 
American  poets  are  no  one  of  them  to  be  in- 
scribed among  the  twoscore  chief  singers  of 
the  world,  they  are  not  the  less  interesting  to 
us  Americans,  not  the  less  inspiring.  When 
an  English  author  suggested  to  Sainte-Beuve 
that  he  did  not  think  Lamartine  an  important 
poet,  the  great  French  critic  suavely  answered, 
"  He  is  important  to  us !"  Without  Lamar- 
tine there  would  be  a  blank  in  French  litera- 
ture. So  we  Americans  may  see  clearly  the  de- 
fects of  Bryant  and  of  Whittier,  and  yet  we  may 
say  that  they  are  important  to  us,  even  though 
they,  like  Lamartine,  are  not  among  the  fore- 
most poets  of  their  language  or  of  their  century. 


AMERICAN    LITERATURE  21 

Colonialism  and  provincialism,  although  they 
seem  mutually  destructive,  still  manage  some- 
how to  exist  side  by  side  in  our  criticism  to-day. 
The  best  cure  for  them  is  a  study  of  the  two 
other  great  literatures,  Greek  and  French.  Too 
much  attention  to  contemporary  British  litera- 
ture is  dangerous  for  us,  since  its  chief  character- 
istics are  ours  by  inheritance.  Matthew  Arnold 
held  that  it  was  a  work  of  supererogation  for 
Carlyle  to  preach  earnestness  to  the  English, 
who  already  abounded  in  that  sense.  For  us 
to  follow  the  lead  of  the  British  in  literature  or 
in  any  other  art  is  but  saying  ditto  to  ourselves. 
It  is  Ifke  the  marriage  of  cousins — and  for  the 
same  reasons  to  be  deplored.  But  the  study  of 
Greek  literature  supplies  us  instantly  with  the 
eternal  standards,  the  use  of  which  cannot  but 
be  fatal  to  provincialism.  And  the  study  of 
French  literature,  which  is  as  modern  as  our 
own  and  yet  as  different  as  may  be  in  its  ideals 
and  its  methods,  is  likely  to  serve  as  a  certain 
antidote  to  colonialism. 

The  study  of  Greek  literature,  the  greatest 
of  the  literatures  of  the  past,  and  the  study  of 
French  literature,  the  other  great  literature  of 
the  present,  will  lead  us  towards  that  American 
cosmopolitanism  which  is  the  antithesis  of  both 
provincialism  and  colonialism.     An  American 


22  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

cosmopolitanism,  I  say,  for  I  agree  with  Cole- 
ridge in  thinking  that  "  the  cosmopolitanism 
which  does  not  spring  out  of,  and  blossom 
upon,  the  deep-rooted  stem  of  nationality  or 
patriotism,  is  a  spurious  and  rotten  growth." 
'*  Stendhal,"  a  Frenchman  who  did  not  care  for 
France  and  who  found  himself,  at  last,  a  man 
without  a  country,  had  for  a  motto,  "  I  come 
from  Cosmopolis."  A  fit  motto  for  an  Ameri- 
can author  might  be  *'  I  go  to  Cosmopolis" — 
I  go  to  see  the  best  the  world  has  to  offer,  the 
best  being  none  too  good  for  American  use; 
I  go  as  a  visitor,  and  I  return  always  a  loyal 
citizen  of  my  own  country. 

As  Plutarch  tells  us,  ^*it  is  well  to  go  for  a 
light  to  another  man's  fire,  but  not  to  tarry  by 
it,  instead  of  kindling  a  torch  of  one's  own." 
A  torch  of  one's  own ! — that  is  a  possession 
worth  having,  whether  it  be  a  flaming  beacon 
on  the  hill-top  or  a  tiny  taper  in  the  window. 
We  cannot  tell  how  far  a  little  candle  throws 
its  beams,  nor  who  is  laying  his  course  by  its 
flickering  light.  The  most  that  we  can  do — 
and  it  is  also  the  least  that  we  should  do — is 
to  tend  the  flame  carefully  and  to  keep  it 
steady. 

(1896.) 


TWO   STUDIES   OF  THE   SOUTH 


TWO  STUDIES  OF  THE  SOUTH 

"  Only  the  literature  of  a  country  teaches  us 
to  understand  its  institutions/*  said  one  of  the 
acutest  of  modern  French  critics,  the  late  J.  J. 
Weiss,  in  a  recent  volume  of  essays ;  and  he 
added,  with  perhaps  not  quite  the  same  pro- 
portion of  truth,  that  '*to  the  historian,  who 
grows  pale  over  them,  collections  of  ordinan- 
ces, codes,  and  constitutions  yield  only  lifeless 
laws."  That  the  laws  afford  us  only  the  skel- 
eton of  a  dead  and  gone  society  we  may  admit ; 
and  we  are  quick  to  see  that  it  is  literature 
which  cases  these  bare  bones  in  flesh  and 
blood.  Unless  its  literature  is  rooted  in  truth, 
a  civilization  may  pass  away  and  be  misjudged 
— honestly  misjudged,  in  good  faith  misunder- 
stood— even  at  the  moment  of  its  passing. 
Such,  so  Mr.  Thomas  Nelson  Page  declares, 
has  been  the  fate  of  the  Old  South ;  it  has  had 
no  historian,  and  so  it  is  in  danger  of  perpet- 
ual misinterpretation;  its  civilization  left  no 
literature ;  and    of   its  laws  the  best  known  is 


26  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

the  slave  code.  The  one  book  which  deals 
with  the  life  of  the  Old  South,  and  which  has 
gone  to  the  farthest  corners  of  the  earth,  is 
the  one  book  by  which  the  lovers  of  the  Old 
South  do  not  wish  to  see  it  judged — '  Uncle 
Tom's  Cabin.'  The  one  book  which  was 
actually  written  in  the  South  between  1825 
and  1850,  and  which  seems  to  me  to  give  the 
most  accurate  account  of  one  aspect  of  South- 
ern civilization,  is  Mrs.  Kemble's  *  Journal  of 
a  Residence  on  a  Georgia  Plantation ' ;  and 
that  again  is  not  a  book  by  which  the  lov- 
ers of  the  Old  South  would  wish  to  see  it 
judged. 

Why  was  it  that  the  Old  South  contributed 
so  little  to  the  literature  of  America?  Why 
was  it  that  before  the  war  Mrs.  E.  D.  E.  N. 
Southworth  flourished  and  Mrs.  Caroline  Lee 
Hentz  ?  Why  is  it  that  immediately  after  the 
war  we  had  only  the  encyclopaedic  romances 
of  Mrs.  Augusta  J.  Evans  and  the  saccharine 
stories  of  *  Christian  Reid,'  as  remote  from 
reality  as  though  they  had  been  translated 
from  the  French  of  Georges  Ohnet  or  from 
the  German  of  "E.  Marlitt  "  ?  Why  was  it  that 
Brer  Rabbit,  having  had  his  misadventure  with 
the  Tar  Baby  in  countless  plantations  through- 
out the  South  before  the  war,  found  no  Uncle 


TWO    STUDIES   OF    THE   SOUTH  27 

Remus  to  come  forward  and  tell  them  for  our 
delight  until  long  after  the  war  ? 

These  are  questions  which  every  student  of 
American  literary  history  must  put  to  himself 
sooner  or  later;  and  there  are  many  other 
questions  like  these.  For  an  answer  one  cannot 
do  better  than  turn  to  two  books  which  were 
published  early  in  the  last  decade  of  the  nine- 
teenth century — two  studies  of  the  South,  by 
two  representative  Southern  writers.  One  of 
these  books  is  the  biography  of  *  William  Gil- 
more  Simms/  prepared  for  the  American  Men 
of  Letters  Series  by  Professor  William  P.  Trent ; 
and  the  other  is  Mr.  Thomas  Nelson  Page's 
volume  of  essays  on  the  *  Old  South.'  Both 
books  are  welcome  ;  both  are  candid  and  hon- 
est ;  both  are  unusually  well  written,  Professor 
Trent's  having  the  solid  framework  of  the 
historian,  and  Mr.  Page's  having  the  warm 
coloring  of  the  poet.  Both  books,  moreover, 
are  the  product  of  that  young,  hearty,  loyal, 
and  energetic  New  South,  which  is  the  best 
legacy  the  Old  South  left  to  the  Union.  Mr. 
Page,  as  becomes  a  poet,  has  a  fondness  for 
the  past,  while  Professor  Trent,  as  is  fit  in  one 
who  is  instructing  youth,  has  his  face  set  res- 
olutely towards  the  future. 

There  are  yet  a  few  Southern  writers  who 


28  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

turn  their  backs  on  the  present  and  prefer  to 
abide  amid  moribund  memories.  Professor 
Trent  is  not  one  of  these.  He  is  willing  to  let 
the  dead  past  bury  its  dead.  In  this  volume  we 
find  a  new  spirit — a  spirit  not  frequent  even 
now  in  works  of  Southern  authorship.  His 
book  is  solid  in  research,  worthy  in  workman- 
ship, dignified  in  manner,  and  brave  in  tone ; 
it  is  not  only  a  good  book,  it  is  a  good  deed. 
It  is  emphatically  a  proof  of  the  existence  of 
that  New  South  which  has  been  so  loudly  pro- 
claimed and  so  often.  In  telling  the  career  of 
William  Gilmore  Simms,  Professor  Trent  has 
taken  occasion  to  sketch  for  us  also  the  envi- 
ronment which  made  Simms  what  he  was — 
which,  indeed,  kept  him  from  being  more  than 
he  was.  Believing  "  that  Simms  was  a  typical 
Southerner,"  Professor  Trent  thinks  that  it 
would  be  "  impossible  to  convey  a  full  idea  of 
his  character  without  a  constant  reference  to 
the  history  of  the  Southern  people  during  the 
first  seven  decades  of  this  century."  As  this 
history  has  been  little  studied  and  still  less  un- 
derstood, Professor  Trent  has  been  led  to  pre- 
sent it  with  a  fulness  of  treatment  which  at 
first  may  seem  disproportionate,  but  which  at 
least  has  resulted  in  giving  to  his  book  a 
breadth  and  an  interest  not  possible,  if  it  had 


TWO  STUDIES   OF   THE   SOUTH  29 

been  merely  the  biography  of  William  Gilmore 
Simms.  The  life  of  the  author  of  *  Guy  Riv- 
ers* and  of  the  'Yemassee'  is  here  set  down 
thoroughly  and  once  for  all ;  but  accompany- 
ing it  is  a  study  of  the  literary  conditions  of 
the  South,  such  as  no  one  has  ever  before 
attempted. 

Only  one  of  Mr.  Page's  papers  is  devoted 
specifically  to  the  literature  of  the  South,  but 
scattered  throughout  his  book  are  passages 
which  cast  a  sudden  and  a  penetrating  light 
on  the  social  conditions  of  the  South  before 
the  war,  and  thus  explain  the  circumstances 
and  the  conditions  under  which  that  literature 
was  produced.  Here,  for  example,  is  one  pas- 
sage: "The  social  life  formed  of  these  ele- 
ments in  combination  was  one  of  singular 
sweetness  and  freedom  from  vice.  .  .  .  They 
were  a  careless  and  pleasure  -  loving  people ; 
but,  as  in  most  rural  communities,  their  fes- 
tivities were  free  from  dissipation.  There  was 
sometimes  too  great  an  indulgence  on  the  part 
of  young  men  in  the  State  drink,  the  julep ; 
but  whether  it  was  that  it  killed  early,  or  that 
it  was  usually  abandoned  as  the  responsibili- 
ties of  life  increased,  an  elderly  man  of  dissi- 
pated habits  was  almost  unknown.  .  .  .  The 
life  was   gay.     In  addition  to  the  perpetual 


30  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

round  of  ordinary  entertainment,  there  was 
always  on  hand  or  in  prospect  some  more  for- 
mal festivity — a  club  meeting,  a  fox-hunt,  a 
party,  a  tournament,  a  wedding.  Little  ex- 
cuse was  needed  to  bring  them  together  where 
every  one  was  social,  and  where  the  great 
honor  was  to  be  the  host.  Scientific  horse- 
racing  was  confined  to  the  regular  race-tracks,' 
where  the  races  were  not  little  dashes,  but 
four-mile  heats,  which  tested  speed  and  bot- 
tom alike.  But  good  blood  was  common,  and 
a  ride  even  with  a  girl  in  an  afternoon  gen- 
erally meant  a  dash  along  the  level  through 
the  woods,  where,  truth  to  tell,  she  was  very 
apt  to  win.  Occasionally  there  was  even  a 
dash  from  the  church.  .  .  .  The  chief  sport, 
however,  was  fox-hunting.  It  was,  in  season, 
almost  universal.  Who  that  lived  in  Old  Vir- 
ginia does  not  remember  the  fox-hunts — the 
eager  chase  after  '  grays  *  or  '  old  reds  ?'  " 

This  is  a  beautiful  picture  of  a  lovely  life ; 
but  such  an  existence  was  too  luxurious,  too 
easy-going,  too  enervating  for  the  cultivation 
of  letters.  Literature  is  not  an  affair  of  slip- 
pers and  arm-chair,  of  mint-julep  and  fox- 
hunt; it  is  a  task,  a  toil,  unceasing  and  un- 
resting; it  is  a  labor  of  love,  no  doubt,  but 
none  the  less  a  labor.     Literature  is  like  the 


TWO    STUDIES    OF   THE   SOUTH  3 1 

other  arts,  a  jealous  mistress,  and  she  refuses 
her  favors  to  all  who  do  not  woo  her  with 
single-hearted  devotion.  This  devotion  litera- 
ture received  from  no  Southerner  in  the  old 
days  except  from  Poe.  Literature  did  not  re- 
ceive this  devotion  from  Simms,  as  Professor 
Trent  makes  clear  to  us ;  and  Simms  was  a 
man  of  ability  who,  under  more  favorable  con- 
ditions and  under  a  stimulus  to  sterner  self- 
discipline,  might  have  left  a  book  likely  to 
last. 

Of  ability  there  was  never  any  lack  in  the 
South.  As  Mr.  Page  says:  "The  causes  of 
the  absence  of  a  Southern  literature  are  to  be 
looked  for  elsewhere  than  in  intellectual  indi- 
gence. The  intellectual  conditions  were  such 
as  might  well  have  created  a  noble  literature, 
but  the  physical  conditions  were  adverse  to  its 
production  and  were  too  potent  to  be  over- 
come." 

And  he  declares  that  the  following  were  the 
principal  causes  which  deprived  the  South  of 
literature : 

1.  The  people  of  the  South  were  an  agri- 
cultural people,  widely  diffused,  and  lacking 
the  stimulus  of  immediate  mental  contact. 

2.  The  absence  of  cities,  which  in  the  his- 
tory of  literary  life  have  proved  literary  foci 


32  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

essential  for  its  production,  and  the  want  of 
publishing  houses  at  the  South. 

3.  The  exactions  of  the  institution  of  slav- 
ery, and  the  absorption  of  the  intellectual 
forces  of  the  people  of  the  South  in  the  solu- 
tion of  the  vital  problems  it  engendered. 

4.  The  general  ambition  of  the  Southern 
people  for  political  distinction,  and  the  appli- 
cation of  their  literary  powers  to  polemical 
controversy. 

5.  The  absence  of  a  reading  public  at  the 
South  for  American  authors,  due  in  part  to 
the  conservatism  of  the  Southern  people. 

That  all  five  of  these  causes  were  potent 
there  is  no  doubt.  But  I  wonder  how  it  is 
that  Mr.  Page  did  not  note  that  four  of  these 
five  causes  are  as  potent  now  as  they  were  be- 
fore the  war.  Slavery  has  disappeared,  that 
is  the  only  change ;  the  other  conditions  are 
much  the  same.  And  yet  that  the  New  South 
has  a  literature  to-day  she  does  not  need  to 
declare,  for  whoever  reads  our  language  knows 
the  books  of  the  new  writers  who  have  sprung 
up  since  slavery  was  abolished.  Mark  Twain 
has  written  about  life  on  the  Mississippi  and 
Mr.  Cable  about  the  Creoles  of  New  Orleans; 
Mr.  Harris  has  given  us  Georgia  sketches  in 
black  and  white,  and    Mr.  Page  himself  has 


TWO    STUDIES   OF   THE   SOUTH  33 

painted  the  young  men  and  maidens  of  Old 
Virginia ;  Charles  Egbert  Craddock  has  taken 
us  up  into  the  mountains  of  Tennessee;  and 
half  a  score  of  other  authors  have  revealed  to 
us  nooks  of  the  earth  and  types  of  humanity 
hitherto  unsuspected.  Yet  the  people  of  the 
South  are  still  agricultural,  still  ambitious  of  po- 
litical distinction,  still  without  cities  and  with- 
out publishing  houses  and  without  a  wide  read- 
ing public  —  for  these  new  Southern  authors 
have  been  brought  out  at  the  North,  in  North- 
ern magazines,  and  by  Northern  publishers. 

This  leads  us  to  believe  that  of  the  five 
causes  given  by  Mr.  Page  one  was  more  im- 
portant than  all  the  rest.  This  one  was  slavery. 
There  was,  I  think,  another  cause  not  given  by 
Mr.  Page,  but  to  this  I  shall  return  later.  That 
slavery  was  at  bottom  really  responsible  for 
the  Southern  abstention  from  literature  is  evi- 
dent to  any  impartial  reader  of  Mr.  Page's 
volume  and  of  Professor  Trent's.  As  Mr.  Page 
himself  puts  it,  "  the  standard  of  literary  work 
[in  the  South  before  the  war]  was  not  a  purely 
literary  standard,  but  one  based  on  public 
opinion,  which  in  its  turn  was  founded  on  the 
general  consensus  that  the  existing  institution 
was  not  to  be  impugned,  directly  or  indirectly, 
on  any  ground  or  by  any  means  whatsoever. 


34  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

This  was  an  atmosphere  in  which  literature 
could  not  flourish.  In  consequence,  where  lit- 
erature was  indulged  in,  it  was  in  a  half -apol- 
ogetic way,  as  if  it  were  not  altogether  com- 
patible with  the  social  dignity  of  the  author. 
Thought  which  in  its  expression  has  any  other 
standard  than  fidelity  to  truth,  whatever  sec- 
ondary value  it  may  have,  cannot  possess 
much  value  as  literature."  And  Professor 
Trent  again  and  again  makes  the  same  dec- 
laration, telling  us  that  "  a  Southerner  had  to 
think  in  certain  grooves." 

Professor  Trent  also  makes  clear  to  us  the 
little-understood  fact  that  the  Southerners  "  re- 
tained a  large  element  of  the  feudal  notion." 
So  we  see  that  "  slavery  helped  feudalism,  and 
feudalism  helped  slavery."  "  If  feudal  England 
was  merry  England,"  says  Professor  Trent  in  a 
passage  I  cannot  forbear  to  quote,  "the  feudal 
South  was  the  merry  and  sunny  South ;  nay, 
more,  it  was  '  a  nation  of  men  of  honor  and  of 
cavaliers.'  The  South  was  never  barbarous,  for 
it  possessed  a  picturesque  civilization  marked 
by  charm  of  mind  and  manners  both  in  men 
and  women.  But  the  South  had  forgotten 
that,  in  the  words  of  Burke,  *  the  age  of  chiv- 
alry is  gone.'  It  ignored  the  fact  that  while 
chivalry  was  a  good  thing  in  its  day,  modern 


TWO   STUDIES    OF    THE    SOUTH  35 

civilization  is  a  much  higher  thing.  Even 
now  many  otherwise  well  informed  gentlemen 
do  not  understand  the  full  meaning  of  the 
expression  *  Southern  chivalry,'  which  they 
use  so  often.  They  know  that  it  stands  for 
many  bright  and  high  things,  but  they  seem 
to  forget  its  darker  meaning.  They  forget 
that  it  means  that  the  people  of  the  South 
were  leading  a  primitive  Hfe  —  a  life  behind 
the  age.  They  forget  that  it  means  that 
Southerners  were  conservative,  slow  to  change, 
contented  with  the  social  distinctions  already 
existing.  They  forget  all  this,  but  the  expres- 
sion has  meanings  which  probably  were  never 
known  to  them.  It  means  that  Southerners 
lived  a  life  which,  though  simple  and  pictu- 
resque, was  nevertheless  calculated  to  repress 
many  of  the  best  faculties  and  powers  of  our 
nature.  It  was  a  life  affording  few  opportunities 
to  talents  that  did  not  lie  in  certain  beaten 
grooves.  It  was  a  life  gaining  its  intellectual 
nourishment,  just  as  it  did  its  material  com- 
forts, largely  from  abroad — a  life  that  choked 
all  thought  and  investigation  that  did  not  tend 
to  conserve  existing  institutions  and  opinions— 
a  life  that  rendered  originality  scarcely  possible 
except  under  the  guise  of  eccentricity." 

In  considering  the  Southern  attitude  towards 


36  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

slavery,  both  Mr.  Page  and  Professor  Trent 
point  out  the  fact  that  the  Southern  feeling 
against  slavery  was  growing  at  the  time  of 
the  Revolution.  That  it  suddenly  changed 
was  due  probably  as  much  to  the  invention 
of  the  cotton-gin  as  to  anything  else.  If 
that  Connecticut  Yankee,  Eli  Whitney,  had 
not  whittled  out  his  machine,  slavery  would 
perhaps  have  disappeared  as  peaceably  from 
Virginia  and  North  Carolina  and  Georgia  as  it 
had  done  from  New  York  and  New  Jersey  and 
Pennsylvania.  But  Eli  Whitney  did  invent 
the  gin  which  made  cotton  king,  and  the  neces- 
sity for  slave  labor  became  at  once  apparent. 
And  at  this  juncture,  when  slavery  was  sharply 
changed  from  a  disappearing  evil  to  a  sacred 
institution,  feudalism  was  also  resuscitated  by 
the  vogue  of  the  Waverley  novels. 

There  is  in  Mark  Twain's  book  on  the  Mis- 
sissippi a  strong  statement  of  the  evil  wrought 
in  the  South  by  Sir  Walter  Scott's  stories. 
After  remarking  that  the  French  revolution 
and  its  product.  Napoleon,  did  much  harm — 
but  they  did  also  this  good,  they  broke  up  the 
feudal  system,  root  and  branch — he  arraigns 
the  author  of  'Ivanhoe'  in  this  wise:  "Then 
comes  Sir  Walter  Scott  with  his  enchantments, 
and  by  his  single  might  checks  this  wave  of 


TWO   STUDIES    OF   THE   SOUTH  37 

progress  and  even  turns  it  back;  sets  the 
world  in  love  with  dreams  and  phantoms; 
with  decayed  and  swinish  forms  of  religion; 
with  decayed  and  degraded  systems  of  govern- 
ment, with  the  sillinesses  and  emptinesses, 
sham  grandeurs,  sham  gauds,  and  sham  chival- 
ries of  a  brainless  and  worthless  long-vanished 
society.  He  did  measureless  harm — more  real 
and  lasting  harm,  perhaps,  than  any  other  in- 
dividual that  ever  wrote.  Most  of  the  world 
has  now  outlived  good  part  of  these  harms, 
though  by  no  means  all  of  them;  but  in  our 
South  they  flourish  pretty  forcefully  still.  Not 
so  forcefully  as  half  a  generation  ago,  perhaps, 
but  still  forcefully.  There,  the  genuine  and 
wholesome  civihzation  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury is  curiously  confused  and  commingled 
with  the  Walter  Scott  middle-age  sham  civil- 
ization, and  so  you  have  practical  common 
sense,  progressive  ideas  and  progressive  works 
mixed  up  with  the  duel,  the  inflated  speech, 
and  the  jejune  romanticism  of  an  absurd  past 
that  is  dead,  and  out  of  charity  ought  to  be 
buried.  .  .  .  Enough  is  laid  on  slavery,  with- 
out fathering  upon  it  these  creations  and  con- 
tributions of  Sir  Walter." 

Slavery  and  feudalism,  either  of  them,  would 
make  literature  diflficult;  both  of  them  together 


38  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

made  it  impossible.  And  lack  of  independence 
of  thought  combined  with  the  fascination  of 
the  pseudo-chivalric  to  encourage  the  accept- 
ance of  foreign  standards  in  literature ;  to  keep 
the  Southern  people,  in  fact,  in  an  attitude  of 
colonial  dependence  to  Great  Britain  at  the 
very  time  that  the  North  was  developing 
authors  of  its  own.  Cooper  to-day  keeps  his 
place  close  at  the  heels  of  Scott,  while  Simms 
is  fading  into  oblivion  as  fast  as  G.  P.  R.  James, 
with  whose  work  his  may  fairly  be  compared, 
although  Simms  was  probably  far  richer  in 
native  gifts. 

Now  slavery  is  dead  and  feudalism  has 
departed,  and  with  them  is  disappearing  the 
pseudo-chivalry  which  made  the  books  of  the 
Southland  ridiculous.  Though  oratory  still 
survives  in  the  South,  and  though  he  who 
"  orates "  is  often  tempted  into  perfervid 
rhetoric,  there  are  now  not  wanting  writers 
who  take  their  stand  on  the  solid  realities  of 
life.  The  new  authors  of  the  New  South  are 
not  now  making  second-hand  imitations  of 
foreign  romance.  They  have  come  to  the 
knowledge  of  the  great  discovery  that  litera- 
ture consists  not  so  much  in  the  mere  making 
up  of  stories  as  in  the  frank  telling  of  the  truth. 
With  the  abolition  of  slavery  came  the  freedom 


TWO    STUDIES   OF    THE   SOUTH  39 

to  speak  the  truth,  with  an  eye  single  to  nature, 
without  any  squint  around  the  corner  to  be 
sure  that  the  truth  might  not  perhaps  interfere 
somewhere  with  the  peculiar  institution.  With 
the  departure  of  feudal  ideals  came  the  ability 
to  see  that  life  as  it  is — the  every-day  existence 
of  the  plain  people — is  the  stuff  of  which  litera- 
ture is  made.  Nowadays  any  one  who  chooses 
to  read  any  American  magazine  can  assure 
himself  that  the  writers  of  the  South  have 
laid  firm  hold  of  the  "principle  of  literary  art," 
to  quote  Professor  Trent,  "  which  requires  that 
a  man  should  write  spontaneously  and  simply 
about  those  things  he  is  fullest  of  and  best 
understands.'* 

(1892) 


THE  PENALTY  OF  HUMOR 


THE   PENALTY  OF  HUMOR 

When  the  time  came  for  the  people  of  the 
thirteen  united  colonies  to  proclaim  to  the 
world  that  they  were  free,  and  that  they  held 
themselves  absolved  from  all  allegiance  to  the 
British  crown,  and  that  all  political  connection 
between  them  and  Great  Britain  was  totally 
dissolved,  a  committee  of  the  Continental  Con- 
gress was  appointed  to  draw  up  a  declaration 
of  independence.  The  members  of  this  com- 
mittee were  Benjamin  Franklin,  of  Pennsyl- 
vania ;  John  Adams,  of  Massachusetts ;  Roger 
Sherman,  of  Connecticut ;  Robert  R.  Living- 
ston, of  New  York,  and  Thomas  Jefferson,  of 
Virginia.  Why  was  it  that  their  colleagues 
committed  the  writing  of  the  Declaration  of 
Independence  to  Thomas  Jefferson,  and  not 
to  Benjamin  Franklin  ?  The  Virginian  was 
not  the  most  prominent  man  even  of  his  own 
section,  and  although  his  reputation  could  not 
fairly  be  termed  local,  it  was  but  little  more, 
while  the  name  of  the  Pennsylvanian  was  well 


44  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

known  throughout  the  whole  civilized  world. 
Franklin  was  not  only  the  foremost  citizen  of 
Philadelphia,  where  the  Congress  was  sitting, 
he  was  the  most  experienced  publicist  and  the 
most  accomplished  man  of  letters  in  all  the 
thirteen  colonies ;  and  he  was  especially  well 
equipped  for  the  drawing  up  of  an  appeal  to 
Europe,  as  he  had  but  just  returned  from  Lon- 
don, where  he  had  been  pleading  the  cause  of 
his  countrymen  with  indomitable  courage  and 
indisputable  skill.  Yet  Franklin  was  not  asked 
to  write  the  Declaration  of  Independence;  and 
although  he  and  Adams  made  a  few  verbal 
amendments,  the  credit  of  that  great  state 
paper  belongs  to  Jefferson.  And  why  was  it 
that  this  responsibility  was  placed  on  Jeffer- 
son and  not  on  Franklin  ? 

I  think  the  explanation  lies  in  the  fact  that 
Franklin  was  a  humorist.  Not  only  was  Frank- 
lin's sturdy  common-sense  felt  to  be  too  plain 
a  homespun  for  wear  in  the  courts  of  Europe 
when  the  thought  needed  to  be  attired  in  all 
the  lofty  rhetoric  that  the  most  fervid  enthu- 
siasm could  produce,  but  also,  I  fear  me  great- 
ly, his  colleagues  were  afraid  that  Franklin 
would  have  his  joke.  It  would  be  a  good 
joke,  no  doubt — probably  a  very  good  joke; 
but  the  very  best  of  jokes  would  not  be  in 


THE   PENALTY  OF    HUMOR  45 

keeping  with  the  stately  occasion.  They  were 
acute,  those  leaders  of  the  Continental  Con- 
gress, and  they  knew  that  every  man  has  the 
defects  of  his  qualities,  and  that  a  humorist  is 
likely  to  be  lacking  in  reverence,  and  that  the 
writer  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  had 
a  theme  which  demanded  the  most  reverential 
treatment. 

So  it  was  that  Benjamin  Franklin  had  to 
pay  the  penalty  of  humor  in  the  last  century, 
just  as  Abraham  Lincoln  had  to  pay  it  in  this 
century.  Because  Lincoln  was  swift  to  seize 
upon  an  incongruity,  and  because  he  sought 
relief  for  his  abiding  melancholy  in  playful- 
ness, there  were  not  a  few  who  refused  to  take 
him  seriously.  Even  after  his  death  there 
were  honest  folk  who  held  the  shrewdest  and 
loftiest  of  our  statesmen  to  have  been  little 
better  than  a  buffoon.  Of  the  three  greatest 
Americans,  Franklin,  Washington,  and  Lin- 
coln, two  were  humorists ;  and  it  is  perhaps 
his  deficiency  of  humor  which  makes  Wash- 
ington seem  more  remote  from  us  and  less 
friendly  than  either  of  the  others. 

**  Never  dare  to  be  as  funny  as  you  can,"  is 
probably  a  good  motto  for  all  men  in  public  life. 
No  doubt  the  British  statesman  who  was  born 
in  the  same  year  as  Lincoln  has  found  his  de- 


46  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

ficiency  in  humor  an  absolute  advantage  to 
him ;  and  no  doubt  a  potent  factor  of  Mr. 
Gladstone's  success  has  been  his  inability  to 
discover  anything  absurd  in  the  solemn  refu- 
tation of  a  novel  like  *  Robert  Elsmere'  by  the 
Prime-Minister  who  rules  the  mighty  British 
Empire.  Of  course  it  was  not  merely  because 
they  were  wits  that  Canning  and  Beaconsfield 
were  distrusted  ;  but  beyond  all  question  their 
ability  to  barb  an  epigram  made  it  harder  for 
them  to  keep  their  hold  on  their  party.  If 
they  had  been  as  impervious  to  a  joke  as  Mr. 
Gladstone  is,  Canning  and  Disraeli  would  have 
found  it  much  easier  to  wring  from  the  British 
pubhc  due  appreciation  of  their  political  sagac- 
ity. Like  all  other  luxuries,  the  perpetration 
of  an  epigram  has  to  be  paid  for. 

Ample  as  the  English  vocabulary  is  to-day, 
since  it  has  been  enriched  with  the  spoils  of 
every  other  speech,  and  opulent  as  it  is  in 
semi-synonyms  for  the  expression  of  delicate 
shades  of  difference  in  meaning,  it  is  some- 
times strangely  deficient  in  needful  terms,  and 
often  we  find  ourselves  sorely  at  a  loss  for  a 
word  to  indicate  a  necessary  distinction.  Thus 
it  is  that  we  have  nothing  but  the  inadequate 
phrase  sense  of  humor  to  denominate  a  quality 
which  is  often  carelessly  confounded  with  hu- 


THE   PENALTY   OF    HUMOR  47 

mor  itself,  and  which  should  always  be  sharp- 
ly discriminated  from  it.  Humor  is  positive, 
while  the  sense-of-humor  is  negative.  A  man 
with  humor  may  make  a  joke,  and  a  man  with 
the  sense-of-humor  may  take  one.  Neither 
includes  the  other;  for  a  man  able  to  make 
a  joke  may  be  incapable  of  taking  one. 
From  an  inadequate  sense-of-humor  many  a 
humorist  is  guilty  of  taking  himself  too  se- 
riously. 

Carlyle,  for  instance,  had  humor,  and  not 
the  sense-of-humor.  Mr.  John  Morley  has 
called  Carlyle  a  "great  transcendental  humor- 
ist," and  a  great  humorist  Carlyle  was,  even  if 
he  were  great  in  no  other  way ;  but  Carlyle  was 
so  devoid  of  the  sense-of-humor  that  he  seems 
never  to  have  suspected  how  comic  a  spectacle 
he  presented  vehemently  preaching  the  virtue 
of  silence  in  not  less  than  forty  successive  vol- 
umes. Dickens  also  was  a  humorist  and  noth- 
ing else;  but  Dickens  took  himself  so  seriously 
that  he  broke  with  Punch  because  that  journal 
refused  to  publish  his  account  of  his  quarrel 
with  the  wife  he  had  promised  to  love,  cherish, 
and  protect.  Probably,  also,  if  the  sense-of- 
humor  had  been  more  acutely  developed  in 
Dickens  he  would  have  spared  us  the  blank- 
verse  pathos  of  his  dying  children;  he  might 


48  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

even  have  refrained  from  out-heroding  Herod 
in  his  massacre  of  the  innocents. 

These  two  quahties,  humor  and  the  sense-of- 
humor,  seem  to  me  to  be  wholly  distinct,  and  it 
is  really  a  misfortune  that  the  terms  for  differen- 
tiating them  are  so  unsatisfactory.  If  we  had 
sharply  contrasting  words  for  the  positive  hu- 
mor, which  is  creative,  and  for  the  negative  hu- 
mor, which  is  mainly  critical,  we  should  not 
be  forced  to  the  paradoxical  declaration  that 
humorists  have  often  no  sense-of-humor.  A 
friend  of  mine  now  makes  it  a  rule  never  to 
risk  a  gibe  with  funny  men,  because  he  had 
twice  ventured  to  crack  a  joke  with  accredited 
wits,  and  they  both  failed  to  take  it,  turning 
the  merry  jest  into  a  serious  matter.  Of  the 
two  qualities,  therefore,  the  sense-of-humor  is 
the  more  highly  to  be  prized.  It  is  an  invalu- 
able possession,  adding  an  unfailing  savor  to 
the  enjoyment  of  life ;  and  any  woman  who 
may  chance  to  be  endowed  with  it  is  always 
company  for  herself.  It  is  so  good  a  thing 
that  one  can  hardly  have  too  much  of  it,  al- 
though an  ardent  reformer  might  find  that  an 
excess  of  it  chilled  the  heat  of  his  resolution. 

As  it  is  an  advantage  of  the  sense-of-humor 
that  it  prevents  you  from  taking  yourself  too 
seriously,  so  it  is  a  disadvantage  of  humor  itself 


THE    PENALTY   OF    HUMOR  49 

that  it  prevents  others  from  taking  you  seri- 
ously. And  there  is  the  danger,  also,  that 
those  who  possess  humor  are  sometimes  pos- 
sessed by  it.  They  may  thus  be  led  to  the 
perpetration  of  incongruities  they  would  be 
the  swiftest  to  perceive  in  another.  Lowell 
was  a  poet  and  a  humorist ;  but  the  poet  wrote 
the  lofty  poem  the  '  Cathedral ' ;  the  humor- 
ist was  responsible  for  the  jarring  note  when 
one  of  the  two  Englishmen  met  beneath  the 
shadow  of  the  church  at  Chartres  took  the 
American  for  a  Frenchman  : 

'  Esker  vous  ate  a  nabitang  ?'  he  asked. 
'I  never  ate  one;  are  they  good.?'  asked  I. 

In  the  '  Biglow  Papers  *  the  poet  and  the  hu- 
morist were  one  being,  not  two  separate  entities, 
and  the  result  of  the  fusion  is  the  finest  satire  in 
our  language  since  the  '  Hudibras  *  of  the  But- 
ler whose  wit  Lowell  abundantly  appreciated. 
But  even  the  author  of  the  'Biglow  Papers' 
had  to  pay  the  penalty  of  humor.  Because 
the  Yankee  dialect  of  Hosea  was  phonetically 
represented  with  artistic  feeling  and  scientific 
precision,  the  British  pirates  lying  in  wait  for 
books  of  "  American  humor "  published  the 
*  Biglow  Papers '  as  though  it  was  a  fit  com- 


50  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

panion  for  the  misspelt  writings  of  Artemus 
Ward.  It  is  a  fact  that  before  he  was  ap- 
pointed minister  of  the  United  States  at  the 
Court  of  St.  James,  Lowell  was  known  to  the 
British  not  as  the  poet,  the  scholar,  the  critic, 
but  rather  as  the  rival  of  Josh  Billings.  If  he 
had  not  been  a  humorist,  Lowell  might  have 
been  wholly  unknown  to  the  readers  of  Great 
Britain ;  and  perhaps  this  would  have  been 
better  than  to  be  greeted  as  an  emulator  of 
those  purveyors  of  "  comic  copy  "  who  kept  a 
misfit  orthography  as  the  leading  article  of 
their  stock  in  trade. 

And  yet  why  should  we  think  the  less  of  a 
poet  for  that  he  has  made  us  laugh?  As  Low- 
ell himself  has  said :  *'  Let  us  not  be  ashamed 
to  confess  that,  if  we  find  the  tragedy  a  bore, 
we  take  the  profoundest  satisfaction  in  the 
farce.  It  is  a  mark  of  sanity."  But  if  this 
confession  were  the  only  mark  of  sanity,  how 
few  of  us  could  get  a  clean  bill  of  health !  We 
are  ashamed  of  our  laughter;  often  we  think 
it  a  thing  to  be  apologized  for.  Nor  do  we 
thank  the  author  of  the  farce  for  the  profound 
satisfaction  we  take  in  it ;  and  appreciation  of 
the  broad  fun  of  farce  is  more  often  than  not 
semi-contemptuous,  as  though  it  were  an  easy 
matter  to  make  people  laugh.     It  is,  indeed, 


THE    PENALTY   OF   HUMOR  5I 

as  easy  to  make  them  laugh  as  to  make  them 
weep,  and  no  easier.  Heine  protested  against 
our  praising  the  tragic  poet  for  his  faculty  of 
drawing  tears — ''  a  talent  which  he  has  in  com- 
mon with  the  meanest  onion." 

In  the  theatre  farce  is  looked  down  on  even  by 
those  who  prefer  it.  Yet  farce  is  a  legitimate 
form  of  the  drama  of  the  most  honorable  an- 
tiquity. It  is  a  form  of  the  drama  in  which 
Aristophanes  and  Plautus  delighted,  in  which 
Shakespeare  and  Moliere  wrote  masterpieces, 
in  which  Goldsmith  and  Sheridan  excelled,  in 
which  Regnard  and  Labiche  revelled.  It  is 
a  form  of  the  drama  having  not  only  the  high 
authority  of  these  great  names,  but  having  also 
at  all  times  enjoyed  the  widest  popularity  with 
the  broad  body  of  play-goers.  But  the  broad 
body  of  play-goers  are  ashamed  to  confess  the 
profound  satisfaction  they  take  in  it ;  they  be- 
grudge the  comic  dramatist  the  double  reward 
of  praise  and  laughter ;  and  thus  they  make  him 
pay  the  penalty  of  humor. 

It  would  be  easier  to  understand  this  semi- 
contemptuous  attitude  if  it  were  shown  towards 
the  mere  clowns  only.  Grinning  through  a 
horse-collar  is  not  the  most  exalted  way  of  earn- 
ing a  living — although  there  are  worse.  But 
the  same  treatment  is  bestowed  also  towards 


52  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

those  in  whose  works  humor  is  only  the  out- 
ward expression  of  serious  thought.  Because 
the  *  Fable  for  Critics'  was  full  of  fun,  many 
readers  in  1849  ^^^  ^^^  discover  that  it  was  the 
acutest  criticism  to  which  our  young  American 
literature  had  until  then  been  subjected.  Per- 
haps no  mask  is  more  difficult  to  penetrate  than 
the  jester's,  and  no  disguise  is  more  effective 
than  the  cloak  of  humor.  Just  as  Shylock  was 
long  acted  as  a  comic  part,  so  *  Don  Quixote'  was 
long  accepted  as  a  jest-book ;  and  no  part  of 
Mr.  Ormsby's  introduction  to  his  spirited  trans- 
lation of  the  masterpiece  of  Cervantes  is  more 
illuminative  than  the  pages  in  which  he  sketch- 
es for  us  the  successive  stages  of  the  discovery 
that  '  Don  Quixote,'  so  far  from  being  a  mere 
piece  of  fooling,  is  really  one  of  the  wisest  books 
of  the  world.  In  like  manner  his  boisterous  out- 
bursts of  gigantic  fun,  always  extravagant  and 
exaggerated,  often  tasteless  and  obscene,  veil 
the  knowledge  and  the  wisdom  of  Rabelais. 

It  is  not  easy  to  suggest  a  philosophical  ex- 
planation for  the  kindly  condescension  which 
the  world  is  wont  to  bestow  on  the  humorist. 
The  condescension  is  kindly,  even  if  it  be  semi- 
contemptuous,  and  there  is  no  suggestion  of  an- 
imosity in  it.  Humor  evokes  little  or  none  of 
the  hatred  that  wit  so  often  arousee.  And  there 


THE   PENALTY   OF    HUMOR  53 

is  a  kind  of  wit  of  which  it  is  well  to  be  dis- 
trustful, for  it  is  dangerous.  This  is  the  scofifing, 
girding  wit  which,  to  use  George  Eliot's  phrase, 
debases  the  moral  currency.  The  persiflage  of 
Voltaire  was  often  inspired  by  honest  convic- 
tions ;  but  there  are  writers  on  the  newspapers 
of  New  York  who  have  cultivated  a  wit  not  un- 
}ike  Voltaire's,  but  with  even  less  of  sincerity 
in  it,  soiling  whatever  it  touches — corroding 
and  disintegrating. 

There  is  no  affinity  between  this  sharp  and 
envenomed  wit  and  true  humor — sometimes 
broad,  perhaps,  but  always  cheerful  and  hearty, 
wholesome  and  antiseptic.  Nor  is  the  doubt 
awakened  by  the  bitter  wit  the  cause  of  the  pub- 
lic attitude  towards  the  joyous  humorist.  For 
that  we  must  seek  deeper.  Having  no  desire 
to  lose  myself  in  the  mists  of  metaphysics,  it  is 
perhaps  sufficient  now  to  suggest  that  we  seem 
to  have  an  intuitive  feeling  that  laughter  is  less 
elevating  than  weeping.  Mr.  Lecky  thinks  that 
a  man  of  cheerful  disposition,  having  enjoyed 
a  tragedy  and  a  farce,  will  admit  that  the  plea- 
sure derived  from  the  former  is  of  a  higher  or- 
der than  that  derived  from  the  latter,  and  there- 
fore, although  mere  enjoyment  might  lead  him 
to  the  farce,  a  sense  of  its  nobler  character  in- 
clines him  to  the  tragedy. 


54  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

In  other  words,  we  intuitively  feel  a  master- 
piece of  tragedy  to  be  superior  to  the  master- 
piece of  farce ;  we  admit  it  to  be  higher  in  kind. 
From  this  intuitive  belief  may  be  deduced  the 
reason  why  our  attitude  towards  humor  is  semi- 
contemptuous.  It  is  the  reason  for  this  intui- 
tive belief  that  it  would  be  interesting  to  have 
elucidated.  Why  does  a  laugh  strike  many  of 
us  as  a  thing  unseemly  in  itself,  and  therefore 
to  be  apologized  for  ?  Admitting  with  Mr. 
Lecky  that  most  of  us  feel  that  humor  is  in- 
ferior to  pathos,  that  the  tear  is  superior  to  the 
smile,  what  is  the  basis  of  this  feeling  ?  what  is 
its  scientific  foundation  ? 

Whatever  its  cause,  this  feeling  is  as  potent 
to-day  in  the  United  States  as  it  was  in  France 
in  the  days  of  Rabelais,  or  in  Spain  in  the  days 
of  Cervantes.  And  the  very  strangest  of  its 
effects  now,  as  then,  is  that  it  blinds  us  to  the 
other  merits  of  a  writer  who  may  amuse  us. 
Though  we  enjoy  the  fun  he  gives  us,  we  set 
him  down  as  a  fun-maker  only;  and  when  a 
man  makes  us  laugh  abundantly  we  refuse  to 
look  into  his  writings  to  see  if  they  do  not  con- 
tain more  than  mere  mirth.  There  is  no  more 
striking  example  of  this  injustice  than  one  now 
before  our  eyes. 

We  have  to-day  here  in  the  United  States  as 


THE   PENALTY   OF    HUMOR  55 

a  contemporary  a  great  humorist,  who  is  also 
one  of  the  masters  of  English  prose.  He  is 
one  of  the  foremost  story-tellers  of  the  world, 
with  the  gift  of  swift  narrative,  with  the  certain 
grasp  of  human  nature,  with  a  rare  power  of  pre- 
senting character  at  a  passionate  crisis.  There 
is  not  in  the  fiction  of  our  language  and  of  our 
country  anything  finer  of  its  kind  than  any  one 
of  half  a  dozen  chapters  in  *  Tom  Sawyer,'  in 
'  Huckleberry  Finn,'  in  'Pudd'nhead  Wilson.' 

Partly  because  his  fiction  is  uneven,  and  is 
never  long  sustained  at  its  highest  level  of  ex- 
cellence, partly  because  he  has  also  written  too 
much  that  is  little  better  than  burlesque  and 
extravaganza,  but  chiefly  because  he  is  primari- 
ly a  humorist,  because  he  is  free  from  cant  and 
sham  pathos,  because  he  does  not  take  himself 
too  seriously,  because  his  humor  is  free,  flowing, 
unfailing,  because  his  laughter  is  robust  and  con- 
tagious and  irresistible,  because  he  has  made 
more  of  our  scattered  English-speaking  people 
laugh  than  any  other  man  of  our  time — because 
of  all  these  things  we  do  not  see  that  in  all  fic- 
tion, since  the  single  footprint  on  the  shore  fell 
under  the  eyes  of  the  frightened  Crusoe,  there  is 
no  more  thrilling  moment  than  that  when  the 
hand  of  Indian  Joe  (his  one  enemy)  comes  slow- 
ly within  the  vision  of  Tom  Sawyer,  lost  in  the 


56  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

cave ;  we  do  not  see  that  no  one  of  our  Amer- 
ican novelists  has  ever  shown  more  insight  into 
the  springs  of  human  action  or  more  dramatic 
force  than  is  revealed  in  Huck  Finn's  account 
of  the  Shepherdson-Grangerford  feud,  and  of 
the  attempt  to  lynch  Colonel  Sherburn  ;  we  do 
not  see  that  it  would  be  hard  to  select  from  all 
the  story-tellers  of  the  nineteenth  century  a 
scene  of  immeasurable  pathos  surpassing  that 
in  '  Pudd'nhead  Wilson '  when  the  wretched 
Chambers  knowingly  sells  his  own  mother 
"  down  the  river." 

When  we  find  that  the  man  who  wrote  these 
chapters,  and  so  many  more  only  a  little  less 
marvellous  in  their  vigor  and  their  truth,  is  set 
down  in  most  accounts  of  American  literature 
as  a  funny  man  only,  when  we  see  him  dis- 
missed with  a  line  or  two  of  patronizing  com- 
ment, as  though  Mark  Twain  were  only  a  news- 
paper humorist,  a  chance  rival  of  John  Phoenix 
or  Artemus  Ward  or  Orpheus  C.  Kerr  as  a  ven- 
der of  comic  copy,  then  we  have  it  brought 
home  to  us  that  humor  is  a  possession  for  which 
the  possessor  must  meet  the  bill.  Mr.  Clem- 
ens, having  more  humor  than  any  one  else  of 
his  generation,  has  had  to  pay  a  higher  price. 

(1894.) 


ON  PLEASING  THE  TASTE  OF  THE  PUBLIC 


ON  PLEASING  THE  TASTE  OF  THE  PUBLIC 

Two  lines  of  the  prologue  for  the  opening 
of  Drury  Lane  Theatre,  which  Dr.  Johnson 
wrote  to  be  spoken  by  his  former  pupil,  David 
Garrick,  still  linger  on  our  lips  as  a  familiar 
quotation : 

The  drama's  laws  the  drama's  patrons  give, 
And  we  that  live  to  please  must  please  to  live. 

This  pair  of  rymes  is  characterized  by  the 
robust  common -sense  which  at  once  limits 
Johnson's  criticism  and  gives  it  its  chief  value. 
Common-sense  kept  the  man  who  could  thus 
compact  a  simple  truth  into  a  striking  couplet 
from  giving  to  his  assertion  an  extension  not 
warranted  by  his  own  long-continued  observa- 
tion of  the  methods  and  the  motives  of  men 
of  letters.  An  absence  of  this  caution  has  led 
later  writers  to  ascribe  the  broad  success  of 
this  or  that  author  to  the  skill  with  which  this 
or  that  author  has  gauged  the  popular  taste  at 
the  moment  of  publication,  artfully  preparing 


I 


6o  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

his  literary  wares  to  meet  a  widespread  de- 
mand which  he  has  shrewdly  foreseen. 

This  is  a  most  unsatisfactory  and  a  most  un- 
scientific attempt  to  explain  away  what  seems 
often  inexplicable  —  the  interest  sometimes 
shown  by  the  book-buying  public  in  the  writ- 
ings of  an  author  whose  works  are  not  es- 
teemed by  his  fellow-craftsmen.  As  it  is  hard 
to  prove  a  negative  I  will  not  maintain  that  no 
author  has  ever  been  clear-sighted  enough  to 
guess  at  the  probable  duration  of  the  next 
swing  of  the  pendulum ;  but  I  am  certain  that 
the  lucky  hits  of  this  sort  must  be  very  far  be- 
tween, and  that  any  author  who  should  rely 
mainly  on  his  ability  to  guess  at  the  kind  of 
book  the  public  was  going  to  thirst  after  six 
months  or  a  year  later  would  be  very  likely  to 
go  hungry  himself. 

And  I  venture  to  believe  also  that  there  is  a 
fallacy  concealed  in  the  phrase  which  speaks 
of  "  the  taste  of  the  public,"  for  it  assumes 
that  there  is  a  public, — one  public  having  a 
taste  in  common  with  all  its  members.  I  am 
inclined  to  think  that,  so  far  from  there  being 
only  one  public,  the  number  of  publics  having 
widely  divergent  likes  and  dislikes  is  indefinite, 
not  to  say  infinite.  These  smaller  publics  are 
no  two  of  them  of  the  same  size;   and  no 


ON    PLEASING    THE    TASTE    OF   THE    PUBLIC      6 1 

doubt  the  membership  of  some  of  them  is  too 
limited  for  an  author  to  hope  to  make  his  liv- 
ing by  pleasing  it.  There  are  in  fact  as  many 
different  publics  as  there  are  separate  authors ; 
and  there  must  be,  since  no  two  writers  ever 
made  precisely  the  same  appeal  to  their  read- 
ers. No  two  leaders  in  literature  ever  had  ex- 
actly the  same  set  of  followers.  The  admirers 
of  Byron  when  he  burst  forth  first  had  been 
many  of  them  the  admirers  of  Scott ;  but  the 
two  circles  have  not  the  same  radius;  and 
they  are  intersecting  and  not  concentric. 

The  broad  reading  public,  to  which  a  pop- 
ular author  is  supposed  to  address  himself,  is 
really  rent  in  twain  by  the  differences  of  its  dis- 
putes over  literary  principles.  Just  as  a  man 
must  take  either  the  Hebraic  view  of  life  or  the 
Hellenic,  to  use  the  distinction  that  Matthew 
Arnold  borrowed  from  Heine,  just  as  he  must 
be  either  an  Aristotelian  or  a  Platonist,  whether 
he  knows  it  or  not,  so  he  is  also  (perhaps  from 
inquiry  and  conviction,  but  more  probably 
from  native  temperament)  either  an  Ancient 
or  a  Modern,  either  a  Classicist  or  a  Roman- 
ticist, either  an  Idealist  or  a  Realist.  The 
standards  are  opposed  and  the  conflict  is  irre- 
pressible. Whoever  enlists  under  one  of  these 
banners   is  ready  with  the   torch   to   torture 


62  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

those  who  volunteer  to  uphold  the  other.  The 
very  acrimony  of  these  discussions  is  all  the 
evidence  any  one  can  demand  before  being  as- 
sured that  the  public  is  not  one,  single,  and  in- 
divisible. 

The  public  is  really  but  a  congeries  of  war- 
ring factions  ;  and  sometimes  these  factions  are 
representative  of  the  degree  of  development 
to  which  those  who  compose  it  have  attained. 
Each,  as  it  rises  a  step  higher  in  the  scale  of 
civilization,  naturally  despises  that  which  re- 
mains below  on  the  plane  it  has  just  aban- 
doned, and  it  is  in  turn  detested  by  that  over 
which  it  boasts  its  new  superiority.  Probably 
a  similar  state  of  affairs  is  visible  wherever 
there  is  progress ;  those  who  are  going  to  the 
front  looking  back  with  contempt  on  those 
who  linger  in  the  rear  —  a  contempt  which  is 
repaid  with  frank  and  justifiable  hatred.  Per- 
haps as  apt  an  illustration  of  this  as  any  now 
available  may  be  found  in  the  present  state  of 
affairs  existing  among  the  vast  body  of  men 
and  women  who  are  fond  of  the  game  of 
whist. 

In  Dr.  Pole's  calm  and  scientific  discussion 
of  the  *  Evolution  of  Whist,  a  Study  of  the  Pro- 
gressive Changes  which  the  Game  has  passed 
through  from  its  Origin  to  the  Present  Time,' 


ON   PLEASING   THE   TASTE    OF   THE   PUBLIC      63 

we  are  told  that  the  development  of  whist  has 
had  four  periods.  In  the  first  of  these  the 
player  relied  chiefly  on  his  master- cards  and 
his  trumps,  following  suit  with  any  one  of  his 
low  cards ;  and  this  Dr.  Pole  calls  the  Primi- 
tive Game.  In  the  second  stage  the  game  was 
raised  into  a  really  intellectual  pastime  by 
Hoyle  and  his  followers,  and  long  whist  gave 
way  before  short  whist.  The  Game  of  Hoyle 
was  the  basis  of  the  development  taking  place 
during  the  third  period,  during  which  there 
was  evolved  the  Philosophical  Game,  indisso- 
lubly  connected  with  the  names  of  Clay  and 
*  Cavendish.'  The  fourth  period  is  that  of 
the  Latterday  Improvements,  in  which  the 
American  Leads  have  been  adopted  with  other 
concomitant  devices  of  like  delicacy  and  sub- 
tlety. 

As  it  happens  there  is  a  department  of  lit- 
erature in  which  the  development  is  singularly 
similar  to  the  evolution  of  whist,  and  in  which 
we  can  also  declare  four  chronological  periods, 
the  one  following  the  other  and  flowering  from 
it.  This  is  the  art  of  fiction.  In  the  begin- 
ning fiction  dealt  with  the  Impossible  —  with 
wonders,  with  mysteries,  with  the  supernatu- 
ral; and  these  are  the  staple  of  the  *  Arabian 
Nights,'  of  Greek  romances  like  the  *  Golden 


64  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

Ass,*  and  of  the  tales  of  chivalry  like  'Amadis 
of  Gaul.'  In  the  second  stage  the  merely  Im- 
probable was  substituted  for  the  frankly  Impos- 
sible ;  and  the  hero  went  through  adventures 
in  kind  such  as  might  befall  anybody,  but  in 
quantity  far  more  than  are  likely  to  happen  to 
any  single  man,  unless  his  name  were  Gil  Bias 
or  Quentin  Durward,  Natty  Bumppo  or  d'Ar- 
tagnan.  Then  in  the  course  of  years  the  Im- 
probable was  superseded  by  the  Probable ;  and 
it  is  by  their  adroit  presentation  of  the  Proba- 
ble that  Balzac  and  Thackeray  hold  their  high 
places  in  the  history  of  the  art.  But  the  craft 
of  the  novelist  did  not  come  to  its  climax  with 
the  masterpieces  of  Balzac  and  of  Thackeray ; 
its  development  continued  perforce,  and  there 
arose  story-tellers  who  preferred  to  deal  rather 
with  the  Inevitable  than  with  the  Probable 
only.  Of  this  fourth  stage  of  the  evolution  of 
fiction  perhaps  the  most  salient  examples  are 
the  'Scarlet  Letter'  of  Hawthorne  and  the 
*  Romola '  of  George  Eliot,  the  '  Smoke '  of 
Turgeneff  and  the  '  Anna  Karenina '  of  Tolstoi. 
The  four  stages  of  whist  are  thus  shown  to 
have  each  its  parallel  in  the  four  stages  of  fic- 
tion.*    The  Primitive  Game  of  Dr.  Pole  is  not 

*  One  of  the  editors  of  the  Chicago  Dial  has  sug- 


ON   PLEASING   THE   TASTE    OF   THE  PUBLIC      6$ 

simpler  or  more  rudimentary  than  the  tale  of 
the  Impossible.  The  Game  of  Hoyle  is  close- 
ly akin  to  the  story  of  the  Improbable.  The 
Philosophical  Game  can  be  matched  fitly  with 
the  novel  of  the  Probable.  The  Latter  day  Im- 
provements of  Dr.  Pole  have  a  rigorous  logic 
which  assimilates  them  to  the  most  modern 
form  of  fiction  in  which  the  Inevitable  deduc- 
tions are  made  from  the  characters  presented. 
"  We  have  noticed  four  steps  or  stages  mark- 
ing the  progress,  and  producing  four  varieties 
of  game,  all  really  whist,  but  whist  in  differ- 
ent stages  of  development,"  says  Dr.  Pole,  and 
his  words  can  be  applied  absolutely  to  the 
four  varieties  of  fiction  also.  "  The  later  forms 
have,  indeed,  grown  out  of  the  earlier  ones, 
but  have  not  necessarily  extinguished  or  abol- 
ished them" — and  this  is  true  of  fiction  too. 
"  The  admirers  of  any  late  step  are  perfectly 
justified  in  showing  its  superiority  to  the  one 
before  it,  but  there  is  room  enough  in  the 
world  for  both  to  continue  to  exist  side  by 
side";  and  it  is  from  this  lofty  attitude  of 
broad  toleration  thus   recommended  by  Dr. 

gested  that  mention  should  here  be  made  of  the  fact 
that  "  there  is,  and  has  always  been,  a  fifth  kind  of 
fiction,  corresponding  to  the  variety  of  whist  known 
as  Bumblepuppy." 


66  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

Pole  that  certain  American  critics  have  de- 
parted when  they  commented  harshly  on  the 
amazing  predilection  certain  British  critics  had 
declared  for  the  more  primitive  forms  of  fiction. 
The  novel-readers  who  prefer  tales  of  the  Im- 
possible or  of  the  Improbable  resemble  the 
whist-players  who  prefer  the  Primitive  Game, 
which,  so  Dr.  Pole  informs  us,  is  still  "  played 
by  enormous  numbers  of  domestic  players,  who 
find  incidents  enough  in  it  to  amuse  them  for 
hours  together.  And  though  many  of  them 
would  doubtless  be  able  to  learn  and  to  enjoy 
a  more  intellectual  form,  there  is  no  reason 
why  it  should  be  thrust  upon  them,  or  why 
they  should  be  calumniated  for  adhering  to 
their  innocent  form  of  entertainment.  It  is 
probable  that  they  follow  fairly  the  general 
mode  of  play  in  the  infancy  of  the  game." 

We  all  see  that  it  was  in  the  infancy  of  fic- 
tion that  it  dealt  with  the  Impossible  and  in 
its  boyhood  that  it  began  to  attempt  the  Im- 
probable. Although  the  liking  for  the  Impos- 
sible still  survives  among  children,  and  is  likely 
to  survive  among  them  always,  I  am  inclined 
to  think  that  it  is  almost  dead  among  men 
and  women  who  have  attained  their  majority. 
The  bulk  of  the  novel-readers  of  this  last  dec- 
ade of  the  nineteenth  century  are  either  in  the 


ON    PLEASING   THE   TASTE    OF   THE    PUBLIC      67 

second  stage  of  development  or  in  the  third ; 
they  have  been  wearied  by  the  exploiting  of 
the  Impossible,  but  they  are  not  yet  ready  to 
enjoy  the  discussion  of  the  Inevitable ;  and 
they  do  not  care  much  whether  the  incidents 
of  the  stories  they  lounge  through  negligently 
are  doubtfully  Improbable  or  actually  Proba- 
ble. But  there  is  a  certain  portion  of  the 
public  which  takes  its  fiction  seriously,  which 
respects  the  art  of  narrative,  which  sees  the 
possibilities  now  open  before  the  novelist,  and 
which  holds  the  story-teller  up  to  the  highest 
standard.  This  portion  of  the  public — wel- 
coming warmly  the  fiction  which  gives  the 
most  truthful  interpretation  of  Hfe — is  steadily 
gaining  in  numbers  and  in  influence. 

I  fear  that  its  swifter  increase  is  not  a  little 
retarded  by  its  own  intolerance  towards  the 
novel-readers  who  yet  delight  in  the  Primitive 
Game.  This  attitude  is  easy  to  understand, 
but  none  the  less  is  it  unfortunate.  "  We  may 
take  it  for  granted  that,  whatever  may  be  the 
exclusive  notions  of  the  select  whist  aristoc- 
racy, there  will  always  be  a  large  democratic 
body  who  will  please  themselves  as  to  what 
sort  of  game  they  will  play,"  says  Dr.  Pole, 
very  pertinently.  "  The  amiable  lady  who  be- 
gins by  playing  out  her  aces,  or  the  pleasant 


68  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

club-member  who  leads  his  lowest  card  from 
five,  ought  not  to  be  upbraided  for  bad  play. 
All  that  should  be  said  is  that  they  play  vari- 
eties of  the  game  differing  from  that  recom- 
mended in  '  Cavendish's  '  latest  edition."  In 
like  manner  the  late  Professor  Boyesen  should 
not  have  berated  Mr.  Andrew  Lang  for  pre- 
ferring Mr.  Haggard's  gory  romances  to  Tol- 
stoi's more  serious  discussions  of  human  expe- 
rience. The  American  critic  should  have  con- 
tented himself  with  pointing  out  that  his  Brit- 
ish colleague  liked  the  Primitive  Game  better 
than  the  Latterday  Improvements.  And  really 
it  was  unreasonable  in  Professor  Boyesen  to 
expect  that  Mr.  Lang  should  appreciate  the 
new  American  Leads,  either  in  literature  or  in 
life. 

Any  movement  forward  by  the  more  intelli- 
gent is  like  the  sending  ahead  of  skirmishers, 
and  we  have  no  right  to  expect  to  find  the 
main  body  of  the  army  close  at  the  heels  of 
the  advance-guard.  The  most  we  can  hope 
is  that  the  ground  taken  by  the  few  pio- 
neers yesterday  shall  be  held  in  force  to-day. 
Generally  any  improvement  in  taste  makes  its 
way  slowly,  and  the  bulk  of  the  public  must 
always  lag  long  behind  the  keener  intellects 
that  delight  to  spy  out  a  new  land  for  them- 


ON    PLEASING  THE    TASTE    OF   THE   PUBLIC      69 

selves.  In  New  York  City,  for  instance,  the 
last  thirty  years  have  seen  a  most  extraordi- 
nary increase  in  the  popular  appreciation  of 
music. 

Toward  the  end  of  the  sixties  Mr.  Theodore 
Thomas  and  his  orchestra  played  every  sum- 
mer night  in  the  old  Central  Park  Garden, 
and  the  programme  was  made  up  largely  of 
medleys  from  Offenbach's  operettas  and  of 
dance-music.  Owing  to  Mr.  Thomas's  increas- 
ing efforts  to  give  better  and  better  music  as 
he  educated  the  New  York  concert-goer,  and 
owing  also  to  the  labors  of  Dr.  Damrosch  and 
Mr.  Seidl,  there  is  now  perhaps  no  city  in  the 
world  where  more  music  of  the  highest  class 
is  heard  in  the  course  of  the  year  than  in  New 
York,  and  none  where  it  is  more  delicately  en- 
joyed. The  finest  of  Wagner's  music-dramas 
are  not  now  too  solid  fare  for  the  subscribers 
of  the  Metropolitan  Opera-house,  who  no 
longer  find  any  satisfaction  even  in  the  most 
expensive  performance  of  sugary  trifles  like 
the  '  Lucia'  of  Donizetti. 

But  though  the  subscribers  of  the  Metro- 
politan Opera-house  have  lost  their  liking  for 
'Traviata'  and  for  '  Trovatore,'  the  occasional 
experiments  of  other  opera  companies  in  other 
New  York   theatres   and   in   opera-houses   in 


70  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION' 

other  cities  of  the  Union  seem  to  show  that 
there  are  perhaps  as  many  music-lovers  as 
ever  who  have  advanced  just  far  enough  to 
understand  and  enjoy  these  simple  favorites 
of  former  days.  The  opera-goers  of  this  class 
are  like  the  whist-players  who  stick  to  the 
Primitive  Game,  or  the  novel-readers  who  revel 
in  romances  of  the  Improbable.  And  I  have 
no  doubt  that  if  a  young  conductor  possess- 
ing such  shrewdness  and  force  as  Mr.  Thomas 
revealed,  should  give  summer-night  concerts 
in  New  York,  placing  on  his  programme  dance- 
tunes  and  medleys  from  operettas,  he  would 
have  now  quite  as  large  a  following  as  Mr. 
Thomas  had  thirty  years  ago ;  and  in  time  he 
could  slowly  lead  on  this  portion  of  the  public 
to  the  acceptance  of  music  demanding  a  more 
careful  appreciation. 

There  is  ready  at  hand  yet  another  example 
of  the  ease  with  which  a  portion  of  the  public 
can  be  educated  to  have  a  relish  for  the  finer 
forms  of  art.  It  was  in  the  sixties  that  Mr. 
Theodore  Thomas  began  his  elevating  work 
here  in  New  York ;  and  it  was  in  the  seventies 
that  the  American  magazines  began  to  seek 
for  a  fresher  and  a  richer  pictorial  embellish- 
ment, a  search  which  slowly  brought  into  ex- 
istence the  illustrated  monthly  due  to  the  lov- 


ON    PLEASING   THE   TASTE    OF   THE    PUBLIC       7 1 

ing  co-operation  of  the  editor,  the  artist,  the 
engraver,  and  the  printer.  The  best  of  these 
sumptuous  pubHcations,  having  gradually  cre- 
ated the  taste  by  which  they  were  estimated, 
attained  to  an  enormous  circulation — a  fact 
which  might  seem  to  prove  them  to  be  pre- 
cisely "  the  kind  of  periodical  that  the  public 
wants." 

Yet  early  in  the  nineties  we  saw  the  appear- 
ance of  a  swarm  of  cheaper  monthlies,  filled 
with  process -blocks  from  photographs;  and 
some  of  these  slight  magazines  also  attained 
to  an  enormous  circulation.  But  as  the  suc- 
cess of  these  new  periodicals  affected  only  a 
little  (if  at  all)  the  sale  of  the  older  and  solider 
magazines,  it  is  obvious  that  *'  the  kind  of 
periodical  that  the  public  wants  "  is  a  question 
to  which  there  are  now  two  answers.  In  other 
words,  while  one  segment  of  the  reading  circle 
has  been  led  to  develop  a  liking  for  the  more 
substantial  merits  of  the  established  maga- 
zines, another  segment  is  attracted  by  the 
cheap  tawdriness  of  the  more  flimsy  novelties. 
And  it  is  quite  within  the  bounds  of  possibil- 
ity that  an  inventive  editor  might  now  devise 
a  third  form  of  periodical  which  should  also 
attain  to  an  enormous  circulation  without 
interfering  with  the  profits  of  either  class  of 


72  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

monthly  now  most  in  favor ;  he  would  only 
be  proving  the  existence  of  a  third  segment 
of  the  reading  circle. 

So  I  return  to  the  assertion  made  in  an 
early  paragraph  of  this  essay :  there  is  really 
no  such  entity  as  the  public.  There  is  a  pub- 
lic ready  to  welcome  everything  which  is  good 
in  its  kind ;  and  there  are  as  many  publics  as 
there  are  different  kinds  of  good  things.  Few 
of  us  are  so  limited  in  our  likings  as  to  belong 
to  one  public  only.  The  extreme  Wagnerite 
is  often  warmest  in  praise  of  a  captivating 
waltz  by  Strauss  ;  and  the  extreme  veritist  can 
acknowledge  the  charm  of  a  romantic  fantasy 
of  Stevenson's.  Perhaps  a  reader  of  extraor- 
dinar)^  catholicity  might  belong  almost  to  all 
the  different  publics. 

Some  of  these  publics  are  very  large  indeed 
and  some  of  them  are  very  small.  '  Hamlet,' 
for  example,  appeals  to  almost  every  type  of 
play-goer,  while  the  performance  of  Ibsen's 
*  Ghosts '  pleases  only  a  chosen  few.  In  gen- 
eral, of  course,  the  higher  up  the  pyramid  is 
cut,  the  smaller  will  be  the  area  of  the  cross- 
section — *  Hamlet '  being  one  of  the  rare  works 
which  are  so  nearly  universal  as  rather  to  bi- 
sect the  pyramid  than  to  cut  across  it.  When 
one  has  once  grasped  firmly  the  idea  that  the 


ON   PLEASING   THE    TASTE    OF   THE    PUBLIC       73 

people  at  large  are  massed  in  a  pyramid,  one 
layer  above  the  other,  with  the  most  intelli- 
gent at  the  apex,  one  cannot  but  see  the  futil- 
ity of  all  assertions  that  "  the  public  wants  to 
be  amused,"  and  "  the  public  wants  sensation 
and  excitement,"  and  "the  public  does  not 
want  analysis  and  disquisition."  There  is  a 
public  that  wants  to  be  amused ;  and  perhaps 
the  larger  portion  of  this  public  wants  sensa- 
tion and  excitement,  and  does  not  want  anal- 
ysis and  disquisition.  But  there  is  a  public 
also  which  does  want  analysis  and  disquisition, 
and  does  not  want  sensation  and  excitement. 
There  is  a  segment  of  the  reading  circle  with 
the  keenest  relish  for  airy  fantasy  and  for  deli- 
cate humor.  There  is  another  segment  hungry 
for  the  naked  truth.  There  is  yet  another 
which  has  no  real  liking  for  knowledge  of  it- 
self, and  which  therefore  likes  to  hear  over 
and  over  again  the  old  outworn  tales  and  to 
listen  again  and  again  to  old  outworn  rymes 
of  love  and  dove^  of  heart  and  part. 

This  diversity  of  public  taste  has  always  ex- 
isted—  except  perhaps  in  the  compact  com- 
munity of  Athens.  In  the  prologue  he  wrote 
for  the  third  performance  of  one  of  his  come- 
dies, Terence  denounced  the  foolish  public  be- 
cause at  the  first  performance  it  was  all  excite- 


74  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

ment  over  an  exhibition  on  the  tight -rope 
which  was  to  follow,  and  because  at  the  second 
performance  the  theatre  emptied  itself  sudden- 
ly in  the  middle  of  the  play  when  a  rumor 
ran  around  the  house  that  there  were  going  to 
be  gladiators  elsewhere  in  the  neighborhood. 
(If  I  may  open  a  parenthesis  here,  I  should 
like  to  drop  the  query  as  to  whether  Gresham's 
Law  may  not  be  as  potent  in  art  as  it  is  in 
finance,  the  inferior  product  driving  out  the 
superior,  as  the  bloody  shows  of  the  arena  in 
Rome  finally  extinguished  the  Latin  literary 
drama.)  In  England,  under  Elizabeth,  the 
wooden  theatres  in  which  Shakespeare's  sub- 
limest  tragedies  were  acted  served  on  other 
days  of  the  week  as  a  ring  for  the  sport  of 
bear-baiting.  In  the  early  part  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  in  London,  when  Sarah  Sid- 
dons  and  John  Philip  Kemble  were  in  the 
plenitude  of  their  powers,  they  played  often 
to  the  bare  benches  of  Drury  Lane,  while  the 
same  night  Covent  Garden  would  be  packed 
with  people  eager  to  behold  a  real  elephant 
take  part  in  a  spectacular  pantomime.  The 
elephant  and  the  bear-baiting  and  the  gladia- 
tors, each  in  their  turn,  pleased  that  part  of  the 
public  which  was  still  playing  the  Primitive 
Game — to  use  Dr.  Pole's  phrase — and  which 


ON    PLEASING    THE    TASTE    OF    THE    PUBLIC       75 

therefore  was  wholly  incapable  of  understand- 
ing the  Philosophic  Game,  so  to  speak,  of  Mrs. 
Siddons,  of  Shakespeare,  and  of  Terence. 

And  yet  that  portion  of  the  public  which 
clings  to  the  Primitive  Game  has  at  least  one 
fine  quality:  it  is  perfectly  sincere.  It  is  not 
a  humbug  or  a  sham.  It  knows  what  it  likes, 
and  it  is  not  ashamed  of  its  prejudices.  It 
makes  no  pretence  of  regard  for  the  more  ad- 
vanced art  it  is  unable  to  appreciate.  It  is 
frank  and  outspoken  in  its  conviction  that 
Hawthorne  is  slow  and  Turgeneff  dull ;  and  it 
makes  no  effort  whatever  to  conceal  its  opin- 
ion that  Ibsen  is  tiresome  and  that  Mr.  How- 
ells  is  colorless.  It  is  wholly  without  the 
snobbishness  which  induces  not  a  few  of  those 
readers  who  really  most  enjoy  the  romances  of 
Mr.  Rider  Haggard  to  pretend  that  they  pre- 
fer the  novels  of  Mr.  George  Meredith  merely 
because  there  was  once  a  Meredith  cult  among 
the  cultured. 

I  am  inclined  to  believe  that  the  position  of 
that  portion  of  the  public  which  retains  its 
primitive  taste  in  literature  is  often  misrepre- 
sented and  even  more  often  misunderstood. 
For  one  thing,  this  portion  of  the  public  is  com- 
posed of  plain  people  who  are  not  only  sincere 
themselves  in  their  literary  likes  and  dislikes. 


76  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

but  are  also  swift  to  detect  insincerity  in  the 
authors  who  seek  to  interest  them.  They  re- 
volt at  the  slightest  hint  of  condescension. 
They  insist  on  being  taken  seriously; — and  this 
is  why  the  ingenious  tales  of  accomplished  lit- 
erators  often  fall  flat,  while  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands were  sold  of  the  sensational  stories  of 
"  Hugh  Conway,"  who  was  not  at  all  a  man  of 
letters. 

Here  we  find  a  possible  explanation*  for  a 
problem  which  has  puzzled  more  than  one  gen- 
eration of  literary  critics — why  do  the  writings 
of  certain  authors  have  an  immense  vogue,  al- 
though these  authors  are  seen  to  be  without  the 
really  great  qualities?  Is  success  in  literature 
only  a  lottery  ?  Is  the  general  public  a  fool 
then,  easily  to  be  led  by  the  nose  ?  As  there  is 
no  effect  without  a  cause,  there  must  be  a  reason 
for  the  popularity  which  sometimes  seems  to  us 
unaccountable.  The  real  explanation  of  the  wel- 
come which  was  bestowed  on  the  *  Proverbial 
Philosophy '  of  the  late  Martin  Farquhar  Tup- 
per,  for  example,  or  on  the  novels  of  the  late 
E.  P.  Roe,  is  to  be  sought  in  the  sincerity  of 
these  two  writers.  Neither  was  in  any  way  a 
charlatan.  Both  of  them  gave  the  public  the 
best  they  had  in  them ;  and,  as  it  happened, 
they  thus  voiced   the   unformulated   feelings 


ON    PLEASING    THE   TASTE    OF   THE    PUBLIC       77 

of  the  segment  of  the  reading  circle  to  which 
they  themselves  belonged.  So  far  from  writ- 
ing down  to  the  public  taste,  as  they  were 
accused  of  doing,  they  were,  in  fact,  writing 
up  to  the  taste  of  the  portion  of  the  public 
that  welcomed  their  works.  By  their  own 
birth  and  bringing  up,  both  Mr.  Tupper  and 
Mr.  Roe  were  in  a  measure  representative  of 
the  "  plain  people,"  as  Lincoln  phrased  it ;  and 
they  could  not  help  taking  the  plain  people's 
point  of  view.  This  the  plain  people  recog- 
nized promptly;  and  the  writers  had  their  re- 
ward on  the  spot.  Their  writings  lacked  the 
permanent  qualities  of  literature,  no  doubt, 
and  that  is  why  their  vogue  was  temporary 
only. 

More  accomplished  men  of  letters  than  either 
Mr.  Tupper  or  Mr.  Roe  have  not  taken  this 
point  of  view  naturally,  and  thus  they  have 
failed  to  voice  the  feelings  of  the  very  segment 
of  the  reading  circle  they  hoped  to  please.  In- 
deed, I  doubt  if  any  author  who  has  tried  to 
guess  at  the  taste  of  the  public  that  he  might 
flatter  it,  has  ever  made  a  hit  satisfactory  to 
himself ;  and  I  am  certain  that  no  author  who 
really  despised  his  audience,  as  more  than  one 
author  may  have  pretended  that  he  did,  has 
ever  really  pleased  those  to  whom  he  made 


I 


78  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

his  appeal  thus  cynically.  It  happens  that  I 
have  met  at  one  time  or  another  many  of  the 
novelists  and  dramatists  of  France,  of  England, 
and  of  America — those  whom  the  critics  delight 
to  honor  and  those  also  at  whom  the  criticas- 
ters joy  to  gird  ;  and  the  quality  which  the  lat- 
ter class  seemed  to  me  to  have  most  abundant- 
ly was  earnestness.  They  believed  in  their  own 
work,  and  they  were  doing  it  as  well  as  in  them 
lay.  Their  success  was  due  to  the  fact  that 
their  best  corresponded  absolutely  with  the 
ideal  of  a  certain  segment  of  the  reading  circle 
or  of  a  certain  proportion  of  the  play-goers. 
In  other  words,  and  to  use  another  of  the  keen 
phrases  attributed  to  Lincoln,  these  popular 
novelists  and  dramatists  were  producing  "just 
the  kind  of  thing  that  a  man  would  like  who 
liked  that  kind  of  thing."  And  that  is  why  they 
met  with  a  far  wider  success  than  the  far  cleverer 
and  far  more  accomplished  men  of  letters  whose 
merits  might  be  vaunted  by  all  who  had  them- 
selves so  far  progressed  in  literature  as  to  appre- 
ciate the  Latterday  Improvements,  as  Dr.  Pole 
calls  them.  It  is  only  now  and  again  that  there 
comes  a  rare  writer  able  to  delight  at  once  his 
brethren  of  the  craft  and  the  plain  people  also  ; 
and  he  does  this  not  by  trying  to  please  the  ; 
public,  but  rather  by  expressing  himself  and    : 


ON    PLEASING   THE   TASTE    OF   THE    PUBLIC      79 

by  doing  always  the  best  he  knows  how.  His 
segment  of  reading  circle  subtends  a  very  wide 
angle  because  his  art  is  as  firm  as  his  outlook 
on  our  common  humanity  is  broad. 

(1895.) 


ON   CERTAIN    PARALLELISMS  BETWEEN 
THE   ANCIENT   AND   THE   MOD- 
ERN  DRAMA 


[This  paper  was  originally  contributed  to  '  Classical  Studies  in 

Honor  of  Henry  Drisler,'  published  in  1894  by  the 

Columbia  University  Press.] 


ON    CERTAIN    PARALLELISMS    BETWEEN 

THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN 

DRAMA 

For  the  man  of  letters  who  has  let  his  clas- 
sical studies  lapse  on  leaving  college,  and  who 
takes  them  up  again  a  score  of  years  later,  there 
are  compensations,  as  I  have  recently  discov- 
ered by  personal  experience.  What  the  man 
of  letters  who  does  this  has  lost  is  incalculable 
and  irrecoverable,  no  doubt,  and  what  he  may 
gain  is  but  little  indeed  and  of  small  worth  — 
yet  it  is  something  if  it  be  only  a  renewed  fresh- 
ness of  view.  And  it  is  indisputable  that  this 
is  the  chief  gain  —  this  ability  to  look  at  old 
texts  from  new  standpoints,  and  to  interpret 
the  life  and  the  literature  of  the  past  by  the  aid 
of  a  deeper  knowledge  of  the  life  and  the  litera- 
ture of  the  present. 

The  vital  principles  of  any  art  are  always  the 
same,  and  they  subsist  through  the  ages  essen- 
tially unchanged,  however  much  they  may  seem 
to  be  modified  superficially  by  the  varying  fash- 


84  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

ions  of  succeeding  generations.  Of  no  art 
are  the  fundamental  laws  more  absolutely 
fixed  than  are  those  of  the  drama.  When, 
therefore,  one  who  has  given  his  attention 
for  twenty-five  years  to  the  modern  stage  re- 
turns to  the  study  of  the  ancient  theatre,  he 
might  fairly  be  expected  now  and  again  to 
note  points  of  contact  between  the  old  and  the 
new. 

A  knowledge  of  the  manners  and  customs  of 
the  players  and  the  playwrights  of  Paris  and 
London  and  New  York  enables  the  student  to 
understand  better  than  he  could  otherwise  the 
manners  and  the  customs  of  the  players  and  the 
playwrights  of  Athens  and  Rome.  When  any 
one  having  an  acquaintance  with  the  modern 
playhouse  inquires  into  the  practices  of  the  an- 
cient theatre,  he  cannot  but  remark  in  the  older 
plays  features  which  are  often  supposed  to  be 
the  sole  property  of  the  most  recent  play- 
wrights. In  the  Greek  theatre,  for  instance,  it 
is  not  difficult  to  discover  that  the  dramatist 
was  generally  careful  to  provide  an  "  exit- 
speech  "  whenever  an  important  character  left 
the  stage;  nor  is  it  hard  to  detect  among  the 
plays  of  Euripides  more  than  one  specimen  of 
the  "  star-piece."  Though  there  may  be  no 
Greek  equivalents  for  these  technical  terms, 


THE  ANCIENT  AND   THE   MODERN    DRAMA       85 

the  things  these  words  denote  existed  in  Greece 
none  the  less. 

The  terminology  of  the  contemporary  thea- 
tre is  precise  and  copious,  although  it  has  not 
as  yet  been  recorded  fully  in  any  dictionary  of 
the  English  language,  or  even  in  any  technical 
vocabulary  of  its  own.  A  "  star -piece,"  for 
example,  is  a  play  so  devised  as  to  display  all 
the  histrionic  powers  of  the  performer  of  the 
chief  part.  Certain  of  Shakespeare's  plays  are 
obviously  "  star-pieces  ":  '  Hamlet,'  for  one,  and 
'  Richard  III.,'  for  another;  and  so  is  the '  Medea' 
of  Euripides.  Medea  is  not  only  the  ''  star- 
part,"  but  the  other  characters  of  the  play  are 
little  more  than  mere  "feeders" — that  is  to 
say,  they  exist,  not  for  their  own  sake,  but 
solely  for  their  relation  to  Medea;  and  they 
speak,  not  to  reveal  themselves,  but  solely  to 
afford  occasion  to  Medea  to  express  herself 
fully  and  at  length  and  under  the  strain  of  the 
most  poignant  emotions.  The  character  played 
by  the  protagonist  is  all-important,  and  the  char- 
acters played  by  the  deuteragonist  and  by  the 
tritagonist  are  all  of  them  subordinated  and 
effaced.  It  is  known  that  there  were  strolling 
companies  of  performers  in  Greece  and  in  the 
Grecian  colonies,  as  there  have  been  of  late 
years  in  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States 


86  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

(Haigh's  '  Attic  Theatre,'  p.  43)  ;  and  to  give  a 
fairly  satisfactory  performance  of  the  '  Medea ' 
only  one  great  actor  was  needed. 

A  renowned  Athenian  protagonist  could  "  go 
on  the  road  "  with  the  *  Medea '  as  certain  of 
pleasing  the  multitudes  who  would  flock  to 
see  him  act  in  the  theatres  of  the  smaller 
Greek  cities  as  Madame  Sarah  -  Bernhardt  is 
now  certain  to  delight  the  audiences  who  fill 
the  playhouses  of  all  the  larger  towns  of  the 
whole  world  to  behold  her  suffer  and  die  in 
'  La  Tosca.'  Nor  has  M.  Sardou  contrived  '  La 
Tosca '  more  adroitly  for  this  special  portabil- 
ity than  Euripides  composed  the  '  Medea.' 
Euripides  is  like  M.  Sardou  in  more  ways 
than  one ;  in  his  exceeding  cleverness,  for  in- 
stance, in  his  dramaturgic  dexterity,  in  his 
mastery  of  theatrical  device,  in  his  predilec- 
tion for  women  as  his  chief  characters. 

"  It  is  stated,"  so  Mr.  Haigh  reminds  us  in 
his  admirable  volume  on  the  '  Attic  Theatre ' 
(p.  y6),  citing  the  authorities  for  the  statement, 
"that  Sophocles  was  accustomed  to  write  his 
plays  with  a  view  to  the  capacities  of  his  ac- 
tors." No  one  who  has  investigated  the  meth- 
ods of  the  great  modern  dramatists  would  ven- 
ture to  dispute  this  assertion ;  and  it  would  be 
easy  to  adduce  reasons  for  thinking  that  Eurip- 


THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN  DRAMA   87 

ides  did  what  Sophocles  was  accused  of  doing.^ 
An  analysis  of  the  '  Medea'  has  convinced  me 
that  in  composing  this  play  Euripides  was,  in 
all  probability,  carefully  "  fitting  " — to  use  the 
technical  term  of  the  theatre  of  to-day — some 
Athenian  actor  by  whose  extraordinary  histri- 
onic ability  he  wished  to  profit,  just  as  M.  Sar- 
dou,  in  composing  *La  Tosca,*  fitted  Madame 
Sarah-Bernhardt,  just  as  Moli^re,  for  that  mat- 
ter, certainly  fitted  Mademoiselle  de  Moli^re 
when  he  was  writing  *  Le  Misanthrope,'  and  just 
as  Shakespeare  possibly  fitted  Master  Bur- 
bage  when  he  was  writing '  Hamlet.'  And  while 
*  Hamlet'  and  'Le  Misanthrope'  are  the  master- 
pieces of  their  authors,  the  '  Medea,'  again,  is 
rather  like  '  La  Tosca,'  in  that  it  owes  its  per- 
manent popularity  to  the  histrionic  opportuni- 
ties it  affords.  After  all,  what  we  go  to  the 
theatre  to  see  is — in  the  final  analysis — acting. 
Whatever  we  may  like  in  the  library,  in  the 
theatre  we  prefer  the  plays  which  give  most 
scope  to  the  actors. 

"  Exit-speech  "  is  the  name  given  to  the  final 
words  spoken  by  a  character  before  he  leaves 
the  stage  after  an  important  scene.  Nowa- 
days   an   exit-speech  is    generally  a  point  of 

■^  Compare  Aristotle, '  Poetics,'  9  (145 1  b  38). 


S8  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

one  kind  or  another,  rhetorical  or  jocular.  In 
Shakespeare's  time  the  exit-speech  very  often 
ended  with  a  couplet,  the  rymes  of  which 
were  signals  to  the  groundlings  to  be  ready 
with  their  applause.  In  the  great  period  of 
the  Spanish  drama,  which  was  contemporary 
with  the  Elizabethan  drama  of  England,  the 
utility  of  the  exit-speech  was  perfectly  under- 
stood, and  in  the  'Arte  nuevo  de  hacer  come- 
dias,'  in  which  Lope  de  Vega  laid  down  pre- 
cepts for  the  guidance  of  practical  dramatists,  he 
advises  the  'prentice  playwright  thus:  "Adorn 
the  end  of  your  scenes  with  some  swelling 
phrase,  with  some  joke,  with  lines  more  care- 
fully polished,  so  that  the  actor  at  his  exit 
does  not  leave  the  audience  in  ill-humor."  In 
the  Greek  drama  the  exit-speech  is  frequent. 
In  the  '  Medea,'  again,  Jason's  final  words  at 
the  end  of  the  stormy  scene  with  his  wife  have 
all  the  characteristics  of  the  exit -speech 
(619-22) : — 

aXX'  ovv  iya>  fiev  baifiovas  fiapTvpofiai, 
a)S  ndvO'  virovpyeiv  <Toi  t€  koL  Hkvois  OeXco  ' 
(Tol  d'  ovK  dp4(rK€i  Toydd',  dXX'  avdadia 
(f)lXovs  aTTW^ei*  roiyap  aXyvveT  nXeov. 

[Yet  I  call  the  gods  to  witness  that  I  seek  to  help 
thee  in  all  things  and  our  children  as  well ;  but  thou 


THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN  DRAMA   89 

carest  nought  for  favors  but  spurnest  thy  friends  in 
wilfulness,  and  for  this  thou  shalt  have  the  greater 
sorrow.] 

An  exit-speech  also  of  the  most  approved 
type  is  Medea's,  when  she  leaves  the  stage 
after  the  marvellously  pathetic  scene  virith  her 
children,  and  after  the  messenger  has  declared 
the  success  of  her  scheme  to  kill  her  rival 
(1244-50):— 

ay   Z)  ToKaiva  X^*P  ^V"?'  ^CI^^  ^i(j)0Sj 
Xa/3*,  fpne  npos  ^aX^lda  XvTrqpav  3ioVy 
Koi  fiT]  KaKia-dfjs,  /xj;8'  dvafimjaOfjs  tckvcov 
a>s  ^iKraff,  las  eriKTes  '  aiKXa.  rfjvde  ye 
Xadov  ^paxf^av  r]p.4pav  iraiBav  <re6ev, 
KaTTeira  6pr]Vfi  •  Ka\  yap  d  Kveve^s  (r(f)'  ofias 
(f)i\ot  y   €(f)v(ravy  Svotvx^s  S'  iyco  yvvrj. 

[Come,  thou  daring  hand  of  mine,  grasp,  grasp  the 
sword !  Put  thyself  at  the  start  of  a  miserable  life ; 
and  become  not  weak  nor  give  thought  to  thy  chil- 
dren, how  dear  to  thee,  how  thou  didst  give  them 
birth !  But  forget  thy  children  for  this  brief  day,  at 
least,  and  then  bewail  them  ;  for  even  if  thou  goest 
about  to  slay  them,  they  were  born  into  thy  affection, 
and  I — a  wretched  woman  !] 

The  complement  of  the  exit -speech  is  the 
device  now  known  as  "  working  up  an  entrance." 
A  leading  actor  likes  to  have  his  coming  before 
the  audience  for  the  first  time  in  the  play  care- 


90  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

fully  prepared  and  plainly  announced,  so  that 
expectancy  may  be  aroused  and  recognition 
may  follow  at  once  upon  his  appearance  on 
the  stage.  Every  play-goer  can  recall  instances 
of  the  ingenuity  with  which  the  modern  play- 
wrights have  been  able  to  work  up  the  en- 
trance of  important  characters;  there  is  no 
better  example,  perhaps,  than  the  first  appear- 
ance of  the  heroine  in  'Adrienne  Lecouvreur,* 
the  drama  devised  for  Rachel  by  Scribe  and 
M.  Legouv^.  Now  this  working  up  an  en- 
trance for  the  chief  persons  of  the  play  was 
far  more  needful  in  the  Greece  of  old  than  it 
is  in  the  Paris  and  in  the  New  York  of  to-day, 
for  the  Grecian  theatres  were  many  times  the 
size  of  ours,  and  the  actors  wore  masks  which 
hid  their  features,  and — so  far  as  I  know,  at 
least  —  there  were  no  programs  to  aid  in 
identification.  Therefore,  we  find  that  the 
Greek  dramatists  were  very  careful  to  work 
up  the  entrance  even  of  unimportant  charac- 
ters. In  the '  Medea,*  once  more,  after  the  pro- 
logue in  which  the  nurse  declares  herself,  no 
person  of  the  play  comes  on  unannounced  by 
some  one  already  on  the  stage ;  and  the  ap- 
pearance of  Medea  herself  is  worked  up  quite 
in  the  most  modern  manner,  her  loud  bewail- 
ings  off  the  stage  being  expounded  by  the  nurse. 


THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN  DRAMA   9 1 

The  fact  is  that  the  psychology  of  the  the- 
atrical spectator  is  very  much  the  same  in  all 
climes  and  in  all  ages.  The  New  York  boy 
who  perches  in  the  upper  gallery  of  the  Broad- 
way Theatre,  however  deficient  in  intelligence 
when  compared  with  the  citizen  of  Athens 
seated  on  a  marble  bench  in  the  beautiful 
theatre  of  Dionysus,  has  needs  like  his  in  so 
far  as  they  are  both  play-goers.  Both  demand 
clearness  above  all  things ;  both  desire  not  to 
be  left  in  doubt  as  to  what  is  going  on  before 
them.  For  a  man  at  the  play,  understanding 
is  the  condition  precedent  of  enjoyment. 

It  is  greatly  to  be  desired  that  some  classical 
scholar  should  familiarize  himself  with  the 
modern  theatre,  so  that  he  might  approach 
the  study  of  the  drama  of  antiquity  with  a  full 
understanding  of  the  present  methods  of  the 
same  art.  Much  of  the  value  of  Patin's  *  Tra- 
giques  Grecs  *  is  due  to  his  knowledge  of  the 
French  theatre  and  to  his  constant  use  of  the 
modern  stage  for  comparison  with  the  ancient. 
In  this,  as  in  other  respects.  Professor  Mahaffy 
has  followed  in  Patin's  footsteps.  But  no  one 
has  yet  done  for  the  Greeks  what  the  late  M. 
Goumy  attempted  to  do  for  the  Latins — to 
explain  the  past  in  terms  of  the  present.  It 
would  be  too  much  to  say  that  M.  Goumy, 


92  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

who  died  before  he  had  half  finished  his  task, 
was  wholly  successful  in  finding  modern  equiv- 
alents for  ancient  experiences.  But  *  Les  La- 
tins '  is  a  volume  to  be  read  with  refreshment 
and  stimulation  ;  and  it  is  good  for  us  to  be  told 
that  Caesar's  *  Commentaries  *  was  really  what 
we  Americans  might  call  "  a  campaign  auto- 
biography," and  that  Cicero  did  not  deliver 
his  orations  as  they  have  come  down  to  us, 
but "  asked  leave  to  print,"  so  to  speak,  that  he 
might  polish  his  periods  at  leisure. 

Though  I  have  neither  the  scholarship  nor 
the  time  to  undertake  the  explanation  of  the 
ancient  drama  by  the  modern  theatre  in  the 
method  I  have  suggested,  I  can  furnish  a  few 
additional  instances  of  parallelism  perhaps  not 
unworthy  of  record.  The  likeness  of  the  Greek 
tragedy,  with  its  appropriate  music,  its  slow 
and  stately  movement,  and  its  use  of  local 
legend,  to  the  Wagnerian  music-drama  has  been 
dwelt  on  sufficiently ;  and,  even  as  I  penned 
these  paragraphs,  I  found  in  the  second  number 
of  the  new  Revue  de  Paris  an  essay  on  the 
specific  resemblances  of  '■  Die  Walkiire '  to  the 
'  Antigone.'  But  less  attention  has  been  drawn 
to  a  more  recent  return  to  Greek  principles  of 
playmaking,  Ibsen's  presentation  of  only  the 
culminating  point  of  the  plot,  and  his  concen- 


THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN  DRAMA   93 

tration  of  all  the  interest  of  the  action  into  its 
compact  climax,  in  which  the  *  CEdipus  Rex  * 
itself  is  scarcely  more  skilfully  contrived  than 
is  *  Ghosts.* 

It  may  seem  most  irreverent  to  suggest  a 
similarity  between  a  masterpiece  of  humor  like 
the  *  Frogs'  and  an  amusing  modern  burlesque 
like  the  'Adonis,'  in  which  Mr.  Dixey  parodied 
the  peculiarities  of  Mr.  Henry  Irving,  much 
as  some  Athenian  comedian  must  have  mim- 
icked the  mannerisms  of  Euripides;  but  never- 
theless the  similarity  of  the  two  pieces  is  strik- 
ing enough.     Indeed,  the  difference  between 
'Adonis '  and  the  *  Frogs '  is  due  mainly  to  the 
fact  that  the  author  of  *  Adonis '  was  only  a 
clever  comic  playwright,  while  the  author  of 
the  *  Frogs  *  happened  also  to  be  a  great  poet — 
just  as  it  is  also  his  poetic  power  which  gives 
Euripides  his  immeasurable  superiority  over 
M.  Sardou.     In  the  *  Frogs,'  for  example,  Bac- 
chus, in  the  costume  of   Hercules,  is  like  a 
modern  actor  in   classic  attire,  crowned  with 
the  very  latest  style  of  stove-pipe  hat ;    and 
ft     when  Bacchus  appeals  to  his  priest  sitting  of- 
W     ficially  in  front  of  the  stage,  he  is  not  unlike 
I      the  comedian  of  our  time  who  holds  a  colloquy 
I     with  the  leader  of  the  band.     I  confess  that 
■     the  comic   servant,  Xanthias,  in  the  *  Frogs,' 


94  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

complaining  that  he  is  not  allowed  to  complain, 
reminds  me  of  the  comic  servant,  Greppo,  in 
the  '  Black  Crook,'  also  involved  in  mysterious 
adventures  which  he  does  not  understand. 

I  wonder  whether  or  not  it  was  a  tradition 
of  the  Grecian  theatres  that  the  performer  who 
played  Xanthias,  or  any  other  comic  servant  of 
the  sort,  should  wear  many  garments  of  con- 
trasting colors,  superimposed  one  on  the  other 
so  that  he  might  excite  the  laughter  of  un- 
thinking spectators  by  removing  them  one  by 
one.  This  "business"  is  traditional  with  the 
Second  Grave  -  digger  in  the  *  Hamlet  *  of 
Shakespeare,  and  with  Jodelet  in  the  '  Pre- 
cieuses  Ridicules'  of  Moliere;  and  it  is  derived 
probably  from  some  forgotten  farce  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  which  in  turn  was  possibly  de- 
scended from  some  Roman  pantomime.  Vis- 
ible jests  of  this  kind  are  very  long-lived,  and 
no  doubt  many  of  them  passed  over  from  the 
l^dlm  fabulcB  Atellancs  to  the  Italian  commedie 
deir  arte. 

For  the  adapted  comedies  of  Plautus  and 
Terence,  with  abundant  Roman  allusions  flow- 
ering out  of  Grecian  plots,  more  or  less  skil- 
fully transplanted,  there  are  many  modern 
parallels.  It  is  not  at  all  uncommon  to  see 
on  the  modern  English-speaking  stage  a  French 


THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN  DRAMA   95 

or  a  German  play,  roughly  twisted  into  con- 
formity with  the  conditions  of  British  or  Amer- 
ican life.  They  may  be  amusing,  like  Mr. 
Augustin  Daly's  later  adaptations  from  the 
German,  or  they  may  be  exciting  like  some  of 
his  earlier  adaptations  from  the  French ;  yet 
there  cannot  but  be  always  an  obvious  and 
inevitable  unreality  in  any  drama  merely  de- 
canted in  this  fashion.  While  the  comedies 
of  Plautus  may  thus  be  likened,  not  unfairly, 
to  the  modern  English  localized  arrangements 
of  foreign  plays,  the  skill  with  which  the  Latin 
dramatist  presented  the  every-day  life  of  the 
Roman  household  and  market-place  suggests 
that  his  comedies  may  also  be  compared  with 
the  amusing  and  broadly  sketched  pieces  in 
which  Mr.  Harrigan  has  most  comically  set 
before  us  the  characteristics  of  the  polyglot 
population  of  New  York. 

Perhaps  no  peculiarity  of  Greek  comedy  has 
seemed  stranger  to  latter-day  commentators 
than  the  parabasis ;  and  yet  to  discover  mod- 
ern equivalents  even  for  this  is  not  difficult. 
I  think  it  is  even  possible  to  derive  from  our 
own  experience  the  reason  why  the  earlier 
dramatists  were  moved  to  make  use  of  this 
device.  The  parabasis — so  Miiller  describes  it 
in  the  *  History  of  the  Literature  of  Ancient 


I 


96  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Greece  (i.,  p.  401) — is  "  an  address  of  the  chorus 
in  the  middle  of  the  comedy  " ;  and  in  it  "  the 
poet  makes  his  chorus  speak  of  his  own  poet- 
ical affairs,  of  the  object  and  end  of  his  pro- 
ductions, of  his  services  to  the  state,  of  his 
relation  to  his  rivals,  and  so  forth."  Then  the 
chorus  sings  a  lyrical  poem,  and  recites  in  tro- 
chaic verse  "  some  joking  complaint,  some 
reproach  against  the  city,  some  witty  sally 
against  the  people."  It  is  this  second  part  of 
the  parabasis  that  Professor  Mahaffy,  in  his 
*  History  of  Greek  Literature  '  (i.,  chap,  xx.) 
likens  to  the  "  topical  song "  of  the  modern 
burlesque,  "  which  is  always  composed  on  cur- 
rent events,  and  has  verses  added  from  week 
to  week,  as  new  points  of  public  interest  crop 
up." 

The  first  part  of  the  parabasis,  wherein  the 
poet  makes  the  chorus  his  own  mouthpiece, 
and  addresses  the  audience  almost  in  his  own 
person,  is  very  closely  akin  to  the  Elizabethan 
prologue,  in  which  the  dramatist  discussed  the 
play  about  to  be  performed,  in  which  occasion- 
ally he  abused  his  rivals,  and  in  which  he  some- 
times vaunted  himself.  And  here  the  prologue, 
like  the  parabasis,  performed  a  useful  function ; 
for  as  the  psychology  of  the  play-goer  changes 
but  little  through  the  ages,  so  also  the  psychol- 


THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN  DRAMA   97 

ogy  of  the  playwright  is  substantially  the  same 
in  Periclean  Athens  and  in  Elizabethan  Lon- 
don. Above  all  things,  the  spectator  wants 
to  be  able  to  understand  what  he  is  seeing, 
and  the  dramatist  wishes  to  have  his  work 
seen  from  his  own  point  of  view.  The  play- 
wright is  glad  to  have  the  right  of  rising  to  a 
personal  explanation.  Nowadays  the  novelist 
and  the  poet  can  declare  in  a  preface  the  code 
by  which  they  wish  to  be  judged.  The  dram- 
atist cannot  avail  himself  of  this  privilege ; 
and  the  prologue  is  the  only  preface  he  is  per- 
mitted. If  he  cannot  get  the  ear  of  the  public 
for  an  explanation  outside  of  his  work,  he  must 
perforce  make  this  explanation  a  part  of  the 
work  itself,  placing  it  either  at  the  beginning, 
as  Ben  Jonson  did,  or  in  the  middle,  as  did 
Aristophanes. 

The  frequency  with  which  the  prologue  was 
made  to  perform  this  function  is  well  brought 
out  in  *  A  Study  of  the  Prologue  and  Epilogue 
in  English  Literature,'  (by  "G.  S.  B.,"  London, 
1884),  wherein  it  is  shown  that  the  prologue 
was  of  real  service  to  Ben  Jonson,  and  that  it 
was  useful  even  to  Dryden,  although  he  had 
already  other  means  of  reaching  the  public  ear. 
The  prologue  and  the  epilogue  still  accom- 
panied new  plays  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth 


98  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

century,  although  they  had  ceased  to  have  any 
close  connection  with  the  pieces  before  and 
after  which  they  were  spoken.  It  is  obvious 
that  the  prologue  and  epilogue  in  Sheridan's 
plays,  for  example,  are  mere  survivals  of  an 
outworn  fashion. 

Yet  even  in  this  century,  when  the  dramatist 
can  call  on  the  journalists  to  publish  abroad 
any  declaration  he  may  desire  to  make,  there 
are  occasions  when  the  temptation  to  expound 
his  own  theories  of  his  art  inside  the  work  of 
art  itself  are  too  strong  to  be  overcome.  In 
the  'Antony*  of  the  elder  Dumas,  in  the  fourth 
act,  there  is  a  discussion  between  Eugene  and 
the  Baron  de  Marsanne  about  Romanticism ; 
what  is  this  but  a  prose  parabasis  cut  into  dia- 
logue ?  And  in  the  '  Denise '  of  the  younger 
Dumas,  the  analysis  of  the  thesis  of  the  piece 
by  Thouvenin  —  in  what  manner  does  this  dif- 
fer essentially  from  the  parabasis?  So  frequent 
has  been  the  use  of  a  character  like  Thouvenin 
by  M.  Dumas  filsy  and  by  certain  of  his  con- 
temporaries, that  the  French  critics  have  been 
forced  to  find  a  name  for  this  new  stage-type ; 
they  call  the  character  who  explains  the  play  a 
raisonneur.  As  it  happens,  the  delivery  of  the 
parabasis  is  not  the  sole  duty  of  the  raisonneur, 
for  he  performs  other  functions  of  the  chorus, 


THE  ANCIENT  AND  THE  MODERN  DRAMA   99 

of  which  multiple  personality  he  may  be  sup- 
posed to  be  a  condensation  into  a  single  per- 
son. He  listens  to  the  talk  of  the  hero  and  of 
the  heroine,  taking  the  part  of  the  confidant  of 
French  tragedy  (itself  a  feeble  substitute  for 
the  chorus  of  Greek  tragedy) ;  he  asks  the 
proper  questions  to  evoke  the  fullest  expres- 
sion of  the  hero's  and  the  heroine's  sentiments; 
he  is  properly  sympathetic ;  and  he  also  serves 
as  a  speaking-trumpet  for  the  author,  being 
sometimes,  as  in  *  Les  Idees  de  Madame  Au- 
brey,' charged  with  the  utterance  of  the  final 
moral. 

To  the  ancient  chorus  and  to  the  modern 
raisonneur  there  was  even  a  medieval  ana- 
logue. In  the  interludes — which  followed  the 
mysteries  and  the  moralities,  and  which  with 
them  prepared  players  and  play-goers  for  the 
coming  of  the  dramatized  chronicle  and  of  the 
romantic  drama — "not  infrequently,"  so  Sy- 
monds  records  in  his  *  Shakespeare's  Predeces- 
sors in  the  English  Drama'  (p.  176),  "a  Doctor, 
surviving  from  the  Expositor  of  the  miracles, 
interpreted  the  allegory  as  the  action  pro- 
ceeded." 

(1894-) 


THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  THE  FOLK-THEATRE 


[This  paper  was  read  at  the  General  Meeting  of  the  Congress 

of  Philological  and  Archaeological  Societies  held  at  the 

University  of  Pennsylvania,  Dec.  27,  1900.] 


THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  THE  FOLK-THEATRE 

To  a  student  of  the  development  of  the 
drama,  nothing  is  more  helpful  than  a  firm 
grasp  on  the  fact  that  the  drama  has  no  need  to 
be  literary  to  accomplish  its  immediate  purpose. 
The  playmaking  faculty  is  perhaps  the  first  of 
all  to  find  free  exercise :  and  there  are  few 
primitive  peoples  who  have  not  revealed  very 
early  their  delight  in  crude  farce  and  in  sym- 
bolic pantomime.  Those  rude  efforts  may  not 
demand  consideration  as  literature,  in  the  loftier 
meaning  of  that  overworked  word;  they  are 
always  artless,  frequently  formless,  and  some- 
times, in  our  modern  eyes,  even  pointless.  But 
without  them,  rough  as  they  were  and  uncouth 
and  vulgar,  the  later  drama  could  never  have 
developed.  In  Greece,  for  instance,  the  mystic 
dances  of  the  Eleusinia  led  to  the  performance 
of  a  primitive  miracle-play  representing  the  sor- 
rows and  consolations  of  Demeter  :  and  in  these 
mystic  dances  therefore  we  must  seek  the  germ 
of  Greek  tragedy.     In  England  again,  the  robust 


104  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

fooling  of  the  fun-loving  medieval  burghers — 
as  we  find  it  preserved  in  the  laughable  scenes 
of  Noah  and  his  wife  and  of  the  shepherd  Mak 
and  his  mates — was  one  of  the  roots  out  of  which 
was  to  spring  the  splendid  flower  of  English 
romantic  comedy.  And  in  France,  once  more, 
the  fabliau  hastily  cast  into  dialogue  by  some 
vj2jci^^x\x\^  jongleur  to  serve  a  chance  occasion — 
an  obvious  practical  joke  shown  in  action,  as  in 
the  '  Cuvier  *  and  in  the  *  Pate  et  la  Tarte,*  was 
the  remote  origin  of  the  searching  and  dignified 
comedy  the  most  consummate  example  of  which 
is  the  *  Femmes  Savantes.' 

Professor  Grosse  in  his  suggestive  discussion 
on  the  *  Beginnings  of  Art '  declares  that  "  the 
drama  is  regarded  by  most  historians  of  litera- 
ture and  esthetics  as  the  latest  form  of  poetry  ; 
yet  we  can  say,  with  a  certain  degree  of  right, 
that  it  is  the  earliest.  .  .  .  We  can  prove 
the  existence  of  the  drama  ...  in  the  low- 
est stages  of  culture."  The  apparent  disagree- 
ment between  Professor  Grosse  and  these  other 
historians  of  esthetics  is  due  to  the  circumstance 
that  neither  he  nor  they  have  seized  firmly  the 
fact  that  in  its  beginnings  the  drama  is  of  neces- 
sity unliterary,  and  that  it  is  the  folk-theatre 
which  makes  possible  the  development  of  a  true 
dramatic  literature.      This  is  often  overlooked, 


THE    IMPORTANCE    OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       I05 

because  when  the  drama  is  once  established 
securely  as  a  form  of  poetry,  its  origin  in  the 
lowest  stages  of  culture  is  carelessly  forgotten. 
The  written  word  of  the  poet  abides  more  dura- 
ble than  bronze,  standing  as  a  model  to  future 
generations,  while  the  primitive  play  was  not 
preserved  because  it  lacked  literature,  being  in- 
deed often  unwritten,  having  been  brought  into 
existence  by  word  of  mouth.  However  profit- 
able it  would  be  if  we  could  trace  the  successive 
stages  of  the  evolution  of  the  folk-play  into  the 
poetic  drama,  we  are  foiled  in  the  attempt  by  the 
scantiness  of  the  records  the  folk-theatre  has  left. 
The  text  of  the  miracle-play  of  Demeter  is  lost 
forever,  if  indeed  it  ever  existed  save  in  oral 
tradition.  It  served  its  purpose  and  passed  out 
of  men's  memories,  save  for  a  casual  allusion  here 
and  there  to  be  collected  laboriously  by  the  his- 
torians of  literature. 

In  his  consideration  of  the  *  Races  of  Europe,' 
Professor  Ripley  declares  that  "  the  greatest  ob- 
stacle heretofore  to  the  prosecution  of  the  half- 
written  history  of  the  common  people  has  been 
the  lack  of  proper  raw  materials.  There  is  a 
mine  of  information  here  which  has  been  barely 
opened  to  view  on  the  surface."  Probably  the 
best  way  for  the  student  of  dramatic  evolution 
to  get  at  this  mine  of  information  is  to  avail 


Io6  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

himself,  so  far  as  may  be,  of  the  methods  of 
comparative  anthropology.  It  was  the  adoption 
of  these  methods  which  enabled  Mr.  Lang  to 
solve  some  of  the  most  puzzling  problems  of 
mythology.  Just  as  Mr.  Lang  made  use  of  his 
acquaintance  with  the  snake-dance  of  the  Mokis 
of  Arizona  to  elucidate  a  somewhat  similar  cere- 
mony recorded  in  the  pages  of  Demosthenes,  so 
anyone  who  wishes  to  understand  the  unliterary 
drama  of  the  past  must  make  himself  familiar 
with  the  unliterary  drama  of  the  present — with 
the  rough  melodrama  of  the  cheap  theatres, 
with  the  vigorous  and  violent  farce  of  the  vari- 
ety-show, with  the  song-and-dance  of  the  so- 
called  vaudeville  performances,  with  the  ele- 
mentary plays  proffered  by  negro-minstrels  and 
circus  clowns.  A  knowledge  of  these  humble 
forms  of  the  drama  is  to  a  student  of  dramatic 
literature  as  useful,  and  indeed  as  necessary,  as 
a  knowledge  of  embryology  is  to  a  student  of 
zoology. 

An  investigator  of  dramaturgic  history  who 
has  also  an  acquaintance  with  these  various 
specimens  of  the  unliterary  drama  of  his  own 
time,  is  continually  happening  upon  significant 
parallelisms.  He  keeps  finding  what  may  be 
termed  either  curious  anticipations  in  the  past 
or  else  strange  survivals  in  the  present.      For 


THE   IMPORTANCE   OF   THE   FOLK-THEATRE        107 

instance,  the  dialogues  of  Tabarin  and  his  mas- 
ter are  probably  fairly  typical  of  the  chop-logic 
conversations  between  the  quack  doctor  and  his 
jack-pudding  throughout  the  middle  ages  and 
well  on  into  modern  times.  Now  almost  the 
first  thing  which  strikes  the  reader  of  the  *  QEu- 
vres  de  Tabarin  ' — after  he  has  made  due  allow- 
ance for  its  flagrant  grossness  —  is  the  close 
analogy  between  those  dialogues  and  the  give- 
and-take  repartee  with  which  the  clown  in  the 
circus  gets  the  better  of  the  pompous  ringmas- 
ter, and  the  cut-and-thrust  retorts  with  which 
the  end-man  of  the  negro-minstrels  retaliates 
upon  the  polysyllabic  interlocutor.  If  we  find 
this  type  of  vehemently  comic  dialogue  flourish- 
ing now  in  the  twentieth  century  here  in  Amer- 
ica and  also  early  in  the  seventeenth  century  in 
France,  is  it  too  hazardous  to  hint  a  possibility 
that  something  not  unlike  it  may  have  been 
known  in  Greece  in  the  third  century  before 
our  era,  and  that  perhaps  Epicharmos  and  So- 
phron  anticipated  the  humorous  methods  of 
Tabarin  two  thousand  years  before  the  Franco- 
Italian  jester  was  born  ? 

Here  indeed  is  little  more  than  a  mere  survival, 
without  any  development  of  a  lower  form  into  a 
higher.  But  in  the  instructive  pages  of  M.  Mau- 
rice Albert — who  has  recently  told  us  the  story 


Io8  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

of  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  theatres  which  were 
allowed  to  exist  in  one  or  another  of  the  fairs 
held  at  different  seasons  of  the  year  in  different 
quarters  of  Paris  from  the  middle  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  to  the  end  of  the  eighteenth — 
we  are  allowed  to  consider  the  successive  stages 
of  a  slow  evolution,  at  the  end  of  which  the 
dramatic  literature  of  France  was  enriched  by 
two  wholly  new  forms — the  melodrama  and  the 
opira-comiqtie — forms  as  prolific  in  the  past  cen- 
tury as  either  comedy  or  tragedy  and  as  charac- 
teristic of  the  French  dramatic  faculty. 

M.  Albert  traces  the  steps  by  which  the  show- 
men who  exhibited  at  first  only  feats  of  strength 
and  skill,  tight-rope-dancing,  ground  and  lofty 
tumbling  and  the  like,  speedily  broke  out  into 
song -and -dance  and  then  rapidly  elaborated 
song-and-dance  into  parody  of  the  more  preten- 
tious performances  of  the  Opera  and  Comedie- 
Frangaise,  still  relying  upon  acrobatics  as  an 
important  element  in  the  delight  they  gave  to 
those  who  paid  to  see  their  performances.  Hav- 
ing no  ulterior  aim,  and  trying  only  to  amuse 
the  pleasure-seeking  Parisians,  bound  by  no 
rules  and  free  from  all  academic  criticism,  the 
theatre  of  the  Fair  expanded  freely  except  in 
so  far  as  the  Opera  and  the  Comedie-Frangaise 
were  able  to  cramp  its  development.     It  called 


THE   IMPORTANCE   OF   THE   FOLK-THEATRE       109 

to  its  aid  the  adroit  and  fertile  Le  Sage  and  his 
collaborators,  some  of  them  almost  as  ingenious 
as  he.  It  strove  solely  to  divert  without  thought 
of  literary  standards,  and  so  it  grew  luxuriantly 
for  a  century  and  a  quarter :  and  when  at  last 
the  Fair  outlived  its  usefulness  and  was  aban- 
doned, more  than  one  of  its  theatres  was  firmly 
established  on  the  Boulevard  to  remain  to  this 
day,  the  home  of  melodrama,  born  and  nurtured 
and  brought  to  maturity  in  the  Fair. 

It  was  for  these  melodramatic  theatres  that 
Pixdr^court  and  Ducange  wrote  their  striking 
and  effective  dramas,  essentially  the  same  as  the 
plays  which  had  been  performed  in  the  Fair, 
although  somewhat  ampler  in  manner  and  per- 
haps more  artistically  complicated  in  plot.  And 
it  was  from  the  Boulevard  melodramatists  of 
the  first  quarter  of  this  century,  it  was  from 
Ducange  and  Pix^r^court  and  their  associates, 
that  the  Romanticists  of  1830  learnt  how  to 
construct  a  plot  which  would  hold  an  audience 
breathless. 

A  melodrama  may  be  defined  roughly  as  a 
piece  in  which  the  situations  create  the  charac- 
ters and  in  which  the  persons  of  the  play  exist 
chiefly  if  not  solely  for  the  sake  of  the  plot: 
whereas  in  tragedy  and  in  the  serious  drama  it  is 
what  the  characters  are  that  is  important,  rather 


no  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

than  what  they  do,  and  the  action  is  devised  to 
reveal  these  characters  completely.  The  differ- 
ence between  Hugo's  *  Ruy  Bias  '  and  Dumas's 
*  Tour  de  Nesle '  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the 
other  *  Thirty  Years  of  a  Gambler's  Life,'  is 
not  a  difference  in  kind  ;  it  is  only  a  difference 
in  literary  skill.  Melodrama  had  come  to  ma- 
turity without  the  aid  of  literature,  and  now 
that  it  had  proved  itself,  the  men  of  letters 
adopted  it  as  their  own. 

No  doubt  the  historian  of  dramatic  literature 
as  he  studies  to-day  the  annals  of  the  earlier 
theatre  can  discover  here  and  there  plays  which 
fall  within  the  definition  of  melodrama;  he  can 
find  them  not  only  in  the  Elizabethan  tragedy- 
of-blood  but  even  among  the  works  of  the 
Greek  tragedians.  But  it  was  not  from  Greek 
tragedy  or  Elizabethan  that  modern  melodrama 
sprang,  but  from  the  unpretending  efforts  of  the 
modest  and  enterprising  purveyors  of  amuse- 
ment who  directed  the  variety-shows  of  the 
Parisian  fairs  during  the  eighteenth  century  and 
who  sought  by  every  means  to  arouse  and  to 
retain  the  interest  of  their  chance  audiences. 
In  M.  Albert's  pages  may  be  read  the  record  of 
the  tentative  efforts,  now  successful  and  now 
unsuccessful,  by  which,  in  the  course  of  a  hun- 
dred years,  the  elementary  song-and-dance  was 


THE   IMPORTANCE   OF  THE   FOLK-THEATRE       III 

developed  into  the  artfully  articulated  melo- 
drama. 

And  from  the  same  elementary  song-and- 
dance  in  the  same  variety-shows  during  the 
same  hundred  years  was  also  developed  op^ra- 
comiqjie — not  merely  the  comic  opera  which  is 
often  only  buffoonery  and  glitter,  but  the  finer 
form  of  which  *  Crown  Diamonds  *  may  be  taken 
as  the  type  and  of  which  *  Mignon  '  and  '  Car- 
men *  are  later  examples.  The  opdra-coniiqtiey 
it  is  true,  is  not  wholly  the  child  of  the  folk- 
theatre  of  the  Fair ;  it  is  partly  the  result  of  a 
fusion  of  one  of  the  theatres  of  the  Fair  with 
the  so-called  Comddie-Italienne. 

But  the  Com^die-Italienne  itself  was  the  child 
of  another  folk-theatre.  It  had  been  established 
to  afford  a  shelter  in  France  for  the  Italian  act- 
ors of  improvised  comic  plays,  the  commedie 
deir  arte.  Now  the  Italian  actors  of  this  com- 
edy-of-masks  were  in  the  beginning  only  a  step 
removed  from  the  performers  of  the  variety- 
show  ;  even  under  Louis  XIV.  in  the  days  of 
the  famous  Arlequin  Dominique,  they  freely  in- 
termingled acrobatics  with  their  dramatics,  and 
th^ir  clown  had  to  be  as  ready  to  turn  a  somer- 
sault as  to  crack  a  joke.  It  is  to  be  recorded 
here  also  that  earlier  in  its  career  this  improvised 
comic  drama — frankly  unliterary  as  it  was,  since 


I 


112  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

the  play  was  even  unwritten,  being  plotted  only 
— had  proved  a  stimulus  to  the  youthful  Mo- 
liere,  whose  'prentice  work  discloses  an  obvious 
imitation  of  the  methods  of  the  Italian  comedi- 
ans. From  these  graduates  of  the  folk- theatre, 
Moli^re  learned  how  to  show  a  story  in  action 
so  briskly  as  never  to  bore  the  spectators — just 
as  Victor  Hugo  availed  himself  of  the  experience 
of  Pixer^court  and  Ducange  in  the  devising  of 
the  framework  of  the  plot  which  he  was  going 
to  drape  with  the  cloth-of-gold  of  his  marvellous 
lyrism. 

Nor  need  we  go  back  to  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury and  to  the  cornmedia  delV  arte,  nor  to  the 
eighteenth  century  and  the  French  theatre  of 
the  Fair;  here  in  America  in  the  nineteenth 
century  there  are  instances  enough  of  a  like  de- 
velopment from  the  variety-show  into  a  more 
elaborate  dramatic  form.  It  is  a  scant  score  of 
years  since  Mr.  Denman  Thompson  began  mod- 
ifjnng  and  enriching  a  crude  dramatic  sketch 
known  as  '  Josh  Whitcomb  among  the  Female 
Bathers '  (and  performed  here  in  New  York  at 
a  hall  which  the  police  closed  more  than  once 
when  the  exhibitions  crossed  the  line  of  tolera- 
tion) into  that  latter-day  pastoral,  the  *OId 
Homestead,'  the  long-continued  popularity  of 
which  undoubtedly  prepared  the  way  for  Mr. 


THE    IMPORTANCE    OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       II3 

Heme's  'Shore  Acres,*  a  stage-study  of   rural 
life,  delightful  in  its  direct  verity. 

A  more  striking  example  can  be  found  in 
the  theatrical  career  of  Mr.  Edward  Harrigan. 
This  ingenious  performer  came  to  New  York 
some  twenty-five  years  ago  with  an  associate 
named  Hart,  and  the  two  appeared  together  in 
a  variety-show,  singing  songs  (the  words  of  which 
were  written  by  Mr.  Harrigan)  and  imperson- 
ating always  distinct  types  of  Americanized 
Irishmen.  These  songs  had  a  strong  local  flavor, 
and  the  music  composed  for  them  was  happily 
tuneful ;  and  the  favor  with  which  they  were 
received  led  Mr.  Harrigan  first  to  expand  the 
spoken  dialogues  which  intervened  between  the 
stanzas  and  the  recurrent  chorus,  and  then  to 
call  in  the  aid  of  other  variety-performers  also 
skilled  in  reproducing  the  readily  recognizable 
characteristics  of  Hibernian  New  Yorkers.  The 
original  duet  was  elaborated  into  a  more  popu- 
lous musical  sketch,  of  which  the  *  Mulligan 
Guards'  was  the  earliest  example.  The  sim- 
ple dramatic  action,  which  was  at  first  the  mere 
decoration  of  a  single  song,  was  broadened  into 
the  semblance  of  a  plot,  thus  making  a  one-act 
farce  in  which  there  were  several  musical  num- 
bers and  in  which  there  figured  a  variety  of 
local   types ;   such   a  farce  was  the  *  Mulligan 


114  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Guards'  Picnic'  Then  in  turn  other  of  the 
dwellers  in  the  motley  tenement-house  districts 
were  introduced — the  German,  the  Italian,  the 
Chinaman  and  the  negro — and  the  sketch  in  one 
act  was  enlarged  to  a  comic  play  in  two  acts  and 
finally  in  three  acts.  Such  a  play  was  *  Squat- 
ter Sovereignty,'  which  may  be  taken  as  the 
culmination  of  Mr.  Harrigan's  effort  to  give 
dramatic  form  to  his  acquaintance  with  the  cos- 
mopolitan inhabitants  of  Manhattan. 

Thus  in  less  than  a  score  of  years  a  definite 
type  of  humorous  drama  had  been  developed  in 
a  single  city  by  the  effort  of  one  man,  a  type 
which  might  have  survived  and  got  itself  rec- 
ognized as  such  in  dramatic  literature  if  it  had 
had  the  fortune  to  be  adopted  by  other  play- 
wrights of  equal  skill  and  of  an  equal  knowl- 
edge of  local  conditions,  or  if  Mr.  Harrigan 
himself  had  been  able  to  retain  his  position  at 
this  level.  *  Squatter  Sovereignty  '  did  for 
certain  aspects  of  New  York  what  *  Shore 
Acres '  did  for  certain  aspects  of  New  England, 
what  *  In  Mizzoura'  did  for  certain  aspects  of 
the  States  on  the  further  side  of  the  Mississippi. 
Perhaps  it  is  the  closest  modern  analogue  to  the 
comedy  of  Plautus  in  which  we  are  made  famil- 
iar with  the  habits  of  speech  and  the  modes  of 
thought  of  the  Roman  populace. 


THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  THE  FOLK-THEATRE   II5 

One  may  even  venture  the  reflection  that  if 
there  had  happened  to  be  a  young  Moli^re  writ- 
ing for  the  American  stage  here  in  New  York 
when  *  Squatter  Sovereignty  *  was  in  the  flood- 
tide  of  its  success,  he  would  have  found  ready 
to  his  hand  a  form  really  richer  and  riper  than 
the  Italian  comedy-of-masks,  of  which  the  au- 
thor of  *  L'Etourdi  '  had  to  avail  himself  in  de- 
fault of  a  better.  Unfortunately  there  was  no 
young  Moli^re  then  in  New  York,  and  now  the 
tradition  bids  fair  to  be  lost  —  the  tradition 
which  he  could  have  taken  as  his  own,  secure 
in  his  confidence  that  the  playgoing  public  had 
already  approved  it,  just  as  Shakspere  was 
secure  when  he  followed  in  the  footsteps  of 
Marlowe. 

"Acting  was  the  especial  amusement  of  the 
English,  from  the  palace  to  the  village  green," 
Froude  records.  "  The  mystery  plays  came 
first ;  next  popular  legends ;  and  then  the 
great  figures  of  English  History  came  out  upon 
the  stage,  or  stories  from  Greek  and  Roman 
writers;  or  sometimes  it  was  an  extemporized 
allegory.  Shakspere  himself  has  left  us  many 
pictures  of  the  village  drama.  Doubtless  he  had 
seen  many  a  Bottom  in  the  old  Warwickshire 
hamlets.  He  had  been  with  Snug  the  joiner, 
Quince  the  carpenter,  and    Flute  the  bellows- 


Il6  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

mender,  when  a  boy,  we  will  not  question,  and 
acted  with  them  and  written  their  parts  for 
them."  Of  these  mysteries  and  chronicle-plays 
and  extemporized  allegories  we  have  not  a  few 
specimens  preserved  for  us  by  good  fortune,  and 
we  can  see  that  they  are  rude  things  most  of 
them,  now  and  then  roughly  effective  in  the 
acting,  no  doubt,  but  ever  lacking  in  literature. 
Even  when  the  scholar  had  lent  a  hand  in  the 
fashioning  of  them,  he  had  laid  aside  his  learn- 
ing and  written  as  one  of  the  ignorant.  Here 
we  have  plays  composed  by  the  people,  and  for 
the  people — true  folk-plays  for  the  real  folk- 
theatre  ;  and  in  these  popular  theatrical  per- 
formances existed  the  promise  and  the  potency 
of  the  brilliant  and  mirthful  Shaksperian 
comedy  and  of  the  awe-inspiring  and  soul- 
searching  Shaksperian  tragedy.  It  is  because 
these  theatrical  performances  were  popular,  be- 
cause they  pleased  the  people,  because  they 
showed  by  example  how  the  people  were  to  be 
pleased,  that  they  were  so  suggestive  and  so 
valuable  to  the  dramatists  who  came  after,  writ- 
ers more  highly  cultivated  in  taste  and  more 
richly  endowed  by  nature  thaia  the  unknown 
contrivers  of  the  chronicle-plays,  or  than  the  for- 
gotten extemporizers  of  allegory.  The  best  of 
these  folk-plays  might  be  without  many  things 


THE    IMPORTANCE    OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       ll'J 

that  we  think  desirable  in  a  work  of  dramatic 
art ;  but  they  had  the  one  thing  needful. 

This  one  thing  needful  is  precisely  what  was 
wanting  in  the  stiff  and  scholastic  dramatic  at- 
tempts of  the  more  learned  poets  in  answer  to 
the  demand  of  the  Italianate  critics.  Sir  Philip 
Sidney,  for  example,  obviously  relished  in  a 
play  not  its  essential  dramatic  quality,  but  its 
external  conformity  with  the  rules  as  these  had 
been  codified  by  the  Renascence  theorizers. 
He  did  not  grasp  the  fundamental  fact  that  the 
proof  of  the  play  is  in  the  acting.  It  is  of  sec- 
ondary importance  whether  the  piece  can  be 
read  with  pleasure  in  the  library ;  the  prime 
merit  is  that  it  can  be  seen  with  pleasure  on  the 
stage.  Here  Aristotle,  whom  Sidney  cites  with 
humility,  is  not  in  agreement  with  him,  for  the 
great  Greek  critic  is  plainly  of  opinion  that  the 
dramatist  must  never  narrow  his  appeal.  As 
Professor  Butcher  sums  up  his  doctrine ;  *'  Aris- 
totle distrusts  the  verdict  of  specialists  in  the 
arts  and  prefers  the  popular  judgment — but  it 
must  be  the  judgment  of  the  cultivated  public." 

Sidney  was  as  wrong  on  one  side  in  rejecting 
the  popular  element  as  the  unlettered  folk-play- 
wright was  on  the  other  in  not  paying  due  re- 
gard to  the  desires  of  the  cultivated  public.  The 
difficulty  of  the  dramatist — and  his  great  reward 


Il8  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

if  he  can  overcome  it — is  that  he  cannot  limit 
his  audience  to  a  clique  or  caste  or  a  sect  as 
even  the  novelist  may.  It  is  a  condition  pre- 
cedent of  his  success  that  he  must  interest  men 
and  women  young  and  old,  rich  and  poor,  the 
absolutely  ignorant  and  the  highly  cultivated. 
The  tragedies  of  Sophocles  and  the  lyrical  bur- 
lesques of  Aristophanes  were  devised  to  impress 
the  whole  body  of  the  citizens  of  Athens,  or  at 
least  as  many  of  them  as  might  find  places  in 
the  immense  open-air  theatre  that  held  so  many 
thousand  spectators.  The  histories  of  Shak- 
spere  and  his  joyous  and  melancholy  comedies 
were  prepared  to  amuse  at  once  the  groundlings 
who  stood  in  the  yard,  the  gallants  who  sat  on 
the  stage,  and  the  city-madams  who  flirted  in 
the  rooms  above.  The  theatres  of  Rome  were 
attractive  only  to  the  lower  orders  of  the  popu- 
lace, soldiers  and  rustics,  freedmen  and  slaves, 
therefore  the  comedies  of  Terence  failed  dis- 
mally and  the  comedies  of  Plautus  were  debased 
to  meet  the  taste  of  the  vulgar ;  and  this  is  the 
chief  reason  why  the  dramatic  literature  of  the 
Latin  language  will  not  withstand  comparison 
with  the  poetry  or  the  oratory  of  that  noble 
tongue.  The  theatres  in  Rome  were  without 
the  cultivated  public  that  Aristotle  demanded  ; 
they  were  without  an  adequate  admixture  of 


THE    IMPORTANCE    OF    THE    FOLK-THEATRE       II9 

the  cultivated  and  the  uncultivated ;  without 
the  leaven  which  lightened  the  mass  of  the  Eliz- 
abethan audiences,  and  which  is  evident  enough 
in  our  modern  audiences  also.  The  dramatist  to- 
day, like  his  predecessor  who  was  Shakspere's 
contemporary,  has  so  to  compose  and  proportion 
his  play  that  he  pleases  the  boys  in  the  gallery 
without  displeasing  the  ladies  in  the  stage-boxes. 
It  is  only  by  adopting  the  practices  of  the 
earlier  playwrights  trained  in  the  folk-theatre 
that  the  later  dramatists  can  hope  to  prepare 
plays  able  to  hold  the  interest  of  the  unlettered 
majority  while  also  able  to  delight  the  more 
literary  minority.  The  drama  can  hope  to 
flourish  as  a  form  of  poetry  only  when  play- 
goers and  players  and  play-makers  have  long 
been  accustomed  to  working  together.  We 
have  the  whole  history  of  dramatic  literature  to 
bear  witness  to  this  assertion  that  the  poetic 
drama  can  be  born  with  a  chance  of  survival 
only  when  the  poet  is  willing  to  take  over  the 
simple  type  wrought  out  by  the  humble  play- 
maker  of  the  folk-theatre.  The  poet  may  refine 
upon  what  he  borrows,  he  may  even  in  time  re- 
make it ;  but  he  must  begin  where  the  earlier 
craftsman  left  off.  The  ancient  Greeks,  for  in- 
stance, were  artistically  the  most  gifted  of  peo- 
ples;  and  they  were  able  to  raise  their  folk- 


120  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

drama  to  a  form  of  poetry  by  their  own  unerring 
instinct  for  the  beautiful,  by  their  own  tran- 
scendent feeh'ng  for  perfection.  In  all  modern 
literatures,  the  influence  of  the  Greek  drama  has 
been  stimulating,  when  it  was  accepted  as  an 
ally  to  aid  in  the  growth  of  the  native  folk- 
theatre  solidly  rooted  in  the  affections  of  the 
people.  But  when  it  was  imposed  as  an  abso- 
lute model  to  be  accepted  without  regard  to 
modern  needs  and  modern  conditions  it  was 
not  stimulating  —  it  was  sterilizing.  As  Ben 
Jonson  declared  with  his  usual  common  sense, 
"  The  writings  of  the  ancients  are  guides,  not 
commanders." 

In  their  desire  for  a  drama  which  should  also 
be  a  form  of  poetry  the  critics  of  the  Renas- 
cence, when  modern  literature  was  on  its  pro- 
bation, reverenced  the  tragedy  of  the  great 
Greeks  as  an  unapproachable  ideal — and  their 
respect  was  none  the  less  because  they  may 
really  have  preferred  the  rhetorical  and  didactic 
Seneca  to  the  truly  tragic  Sophocles.  In  the 
sixteenth  century  when  the  Italian  esthetic  the- 
orists were  beginning  to  forge  the  triple  frame- 
work of  the  Unities  of  Action,  of  Time,  and  of 
Place,  a  steel  cage  in  which  so  many  of  the 
poets  of  Europe  were  to  be  confined,  Italy  itself 
had  a  flourishing  folk-theatre.     So  had  France 


THE    IMPORTANCE    OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       121 

and  Spain  and  England  also,  where  the  plain 
people  were  entertained  with  mysteries  and 
moralities,  with  brisk  interludes  and  broad  farces. 
But  in  Italy  this  folk-theatre  had  assumed  a 
form  special  to  itself — the  commedia  delV  arte, 
the  comedy-of-masks.  Strolling  companies  of 
actors,  each  of  whom  represented  always  the 
same  fixed  character  whatever  the  circumstances 
of  the  story,  were  accustomed  to  perform  im- 
provised pieces — dramas  in  which  the  plot  was 
outlined  only,  and  in  which  the  players  made 
up  the  dialogue  out  of  their  own  heads.  Here 
was  a  popular  theatre  ready  to  the  hand  of  the 
true  dramatist,  who  should  have  accepted  the 
traditional  conditions  and  who  should  have 
bided  his  time  cleverly  to  lift  this  comedy-of- 
masks  into  literature.  That  this  elevation  of 
the  type  was  possible  we  know,  because  we  can 
see  that  Moliere  did  it  a  century  or  more  later, 
and  so  did  Gozzi  again  more  than  a  century 
after  Moliere.  But  there  was  no  true  dramatist 
in  Italy  then  ;  and  the  men  of  letters  who  might 
have  been  made  into  dramatists  refused  to  learn 
from  the  unlettered  and  so  scorned  the  com- 
media deir  arte  with  its  Pantal^ne  and  its  Ar- 
lechino  that  they  refused  to  reckon  with  it,  pre- 
ferring to  write  plays  of  their  own  in  empty 
imitation  of  Terence — not  knowing  that  if  the 


122  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

improvised  comedy  is  really  derived  from  the 
fabiilce  Atellance,  it  has  the  same  remote  an- 
cestry as  Latin  comedy.  Because  the  Italian 
men  of  letters  despised  the  existing  folk-theatre 
of  the  plain  people,  and  would  not  condescend 
to  help  it  to  higher  things,  Italy  failed  to  pos- 
sess a  poetic  drama.  The  plays  the  men  of  let- 
ters wrote  had  no  roots  in  the  soil  and  they 
withered  speedily.  The  plays  that  the  people 
enjoyed  continued  to  be  without  literary  qual- 
ity. As  a  form  of  poetry  the  drama  can  scarce- 
ly be  said  to  have  existed  in  Italy  until  the  end 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  even  then  it  was 
a  transplanted  exotic  from  France. 

Spain  was  more  fortunate.  Spain  had  also 
its  folk-theatre,  seemingly  very  similar  to  that 
which  had  come  into  being  in  England.  In 
Lope  de  Vega  the  Iberian  peninsula  had  luck- 
ily the  man  of  letters  the  Italian  peninsula 
lacked — a  man  of  letters  willing  to  take  the  ex- 
isting unliterary  play  and  to  raise  this  into  a 
form  of  poetry.  Unhappily,  however.  Lope  was 
more  of  a  popular  play-maker  than  he  was  a 
poet.  He  was  afraid  often  to  do  his  best,  and 
he  w^as  not  willing  to  keep  the  varied  move- 
ment of  the  traditional  folk-play  and  to  combine 
with  this  the  order  and  the  elevation  of  the 
great  Greeks.     As  a  scholar  Lope  was  acquaint- 


THE    IMPORTANCE    OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       1 23 

ed  with  the  masterpieces  of  antiquity,  but  as  a 
dramatist  he  felt  himself  forced  sadly  to  refuse 
their  counsel.  He  tells  us  that  when  he  en- 
tered his  study  to  compose  a  comedy,  he  prompt- 
ly locked  up  Terence  and  Plautus  out  of  sight. 
Even  in  the  finest  plays  of  Lope's  marvellous 
successor,  Calderon,  we  find  rather  a  spectacular 
skill  and  an  overwhelming  lyric  fervor  than  the 
solid  mass  and  dignity  of  a  truly  great  drama- 
tist's masterpieces.  In  other  words,  the  Span- 
ish folk-theatre  was  too  strong  for  the  men  of 
letters  to  capture  it  entirely,  rather  were  they 
taken  captive ;  and  as  we  study  the  dramatic 
literature  of  Spain  we  cannot  but  feel  that,  af- 
fluent and  splendid  as  it  is,  it  would  have  been 
far  more  artistic,  far  loftier  even,  if  it  had  come 
more  completely  under  the  influence  of  the 
classic  ideal — if,  while  refusing  blind  obedience 
to  the  ancients,  it  had  been  more  willing  to 
accept  their  guidance. 

In  France,  where  the  folk-theatre  was  as  ac- 
tive and  as  vigorous  as  in  Spain,  the  social  in- 
stinct of  the  people  and  their  eagerness  for 
logic,  for  order,  and  even  for  restraint,  made  the 
task  easier  for  the  Italianate  critics  who  de- 
manded an  implicit  acceptance  of  the  classicist 
doctrine.  Fortunately  Rotrou  and  Corneille 
and  Moli^re  began  all  of  them  as  practical  play- 


124  ASPECTS    OF   FICTION 

Wrights,  learning  how  to  please  the  plain  people 
before  they  spared  a  thought  for  the  desires  of 
the  cultivated.  Corneille  apparently  had  given 
little  heed  to  any  theory  of  his  art  until  he  was 
forced  to  defend  the  *  Cid ' ;  and  Moli^re,  al- 
though grounded  in  his  classics  as  became  a 
pupil  of  the  Jesuits,  had  too  much  common 
sense  ever  to  mistake  the  shadow  for  the  sub- 
stance. Yet  the  French  are  the  inheritors  of 
the  Latin  tradition  and  they  have  a  national 
liking  for  the  strong  arm  of  the  law,  so  that  the 
code  of  the  Three  Unities  appealed  to  them  far 
more  than  it  did  to  the  Spaniards.  And  its  ac- 
ceptance was  hastened  by  a  special  circumstance 
derived  from  the  conditions  under  which  the 
earlier  mysteries  were  presented.  In  England 
the  successive  acts  of  this  primitive  play  were 
shown  on  separate  carts  decorated  for  the  pur- 
pose and  not  unlike  these  we  now  call  floats 
(they  were  then  termed  pageants)',  but  in 
France  the  various  scenes  were  set  up  altogeth- 
er on  a  long  stage,  with  Heaven  on  the  far 
right,  and  with  Hellmouth  on  the  far  left, 
while  the  Temple  and  the  House  of  the  High 
Priest  and  the  Lake  of  Gennesaret  stretched 
along,  one  by  the  side  of  the  other,  all  visible 
at  the  same  time.  The  Hotel  de  Bourgogne, 
long  the  sole  theatre  of  Paris,  was  constructed 


THE    IMPORTANCE   OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       1 25 

specially  for  these  mysteries,  and  its  stage  was 
accustomed  to  this  tumultuous  medley  of  places, 
which  must  have  become  increasingly  distract- 
ing as  more  or  less  original  plots  came  in  turn 
to  take  the  place  of  the  familiar  episodes  of  the 
sacred  story.  When  this  scenic  complexity 
was  abolished  under  plea  of  securing  the  Unity 
of  Place,  probably  the  simplification  was  quite 
welcome  to  the  plain  people  who  made  up  the 
bulk  of  the  play-going  public. 

In  this  conflict  between  the  mere  theories  of 
the  scholars  and  the  actual  practice  of  the  pop- 
ular play -makers,  the  former  got  the  best  of 
it  in  France  and  the  latter  in  Spain.  In  Eng- 
land the  result  of  the  struggle  was  more  sat- 
isfactory than  anywhere  else.  The  English 
dramatists  rejected  absolutely  the  artificial  leg- 
islation of  the  Italian  theorists ;  but  their  mas- 
terpieces survive  to  prove  that  they  accepted 
the  essential  principles  of  classic  art.  The  con- 
temporary critics  could  not  be  expected  to  see 
this,  and  even  the  English  dramatists  themselves 
may  have  been  unconscious  of  their  conformity 
with  Greek  ideals.  Yet  it  is  only  by  allowing 
due  weight  to  the  mighty  influence  exerted  by 
even  a  slight  familiarity  with  the  great  Greek 
tragedies,  perhaps  seem  dimly  through  a  trans- 
lation, that  we  can  understand  how  it  was  that 


126  ASPECTS    OF   FICTION 

the  robust  play  which  had  no  pretence  to  art  or 
to  literature,  and  which  was  planned  solely  to 
please  the  groundlings  who  revelled  in  the  gore 
and  the  bombast  and  the  violence  of  the  trag- 
edy-of-blood — how  it  was  that  this  uncouth 
play  was  purified  by  slow  degrees  and  trans- 
formed at  last  so  that  the  same  public  was  led 
to  enjoy  and  to  applaud  *  Othello  '  and  'Mac- 
beth,' tragedies  of  lofty  purpose,  with  a  sim- 
plicity of  theme  and  a  unity  of  structure  essen- 
tially Greek,  while  possessing  also  a  freedom 
and  an  affluence  characteristically  English. 

Thus  we  see  that  the  Elizabethan  drama 
which  is  the  chief  glory  of  English  literature,  is 
like  the  Spanish  drama  of  the  golden  period 
and  like  the  French  drama  of  Louis  XIV.,  in 
that  it  was  an  outgrowth  of  the  native  folk- 
play,  unliterary  as  that  was  and  often  unwritten. 
We  can  see  also — and  it  would  not  be  difflcult 
to  demonstrate  in  detail — that  the  closet-drama, 
so  called  that  the  play  written  with  no  intent 
that  it  should  be  played,  that  the  poem  in  dia- 
logue composed  by  a  man  of  letters  without  re- 
gard to  the  actual  conditions  of  the  theatre  of  his 
own  time,  has  contributed  nothing  whatever  to 
this  splendid  result.  *  Samson  Agonistes,'  and 
*  Manfred  '  and  *  Prometheus  Unbound '  are  im- 
portant to  the  lovers  of  English  poetry,  but  they 


THE    IMPORTANCE    OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       1 27 

may  be  neglected  by  the  historians  of  the  Eng- 
lish drama.  They  are  as  academic  (and  almost 
as  unreal  from  one  point  of  view)  as  *  Atalanta 
in  Calydon  *  and  *  Merope.*  They  stand  out- 
side the  current,  like  the  absurd  plays  written 
by  the  nun  of  Gandesheim  which  occupy  an 
inexcusable  space  in  some  histories  of  the  drama. 
An  anonymous  farce  like  *  Patelin  '  is  of  more 
importance  in  the  history  of  French  comedy  than 
are  all  the  unactable  plays  of  Byron  and  Shelley, 
of  Browning  and  Swinburne,  in  the  history  of 
English  tragedy.  Victor  Hugo's  'Hernani'  is 
an  important  document  in  the  record  of  French 
drama,  but  his  *  Cromwell,'  which  was  never 
performed,  is  of  significance  only  because  of  its 
preface.  And  *  Hernani '  when  stripped  of  its 
lyric  adornment  is  seen  to  depend  for  its  interest 
on  devices,  invented  by  Pix6r6court  and  Du- 
cange  when  they  were  bringing  to  its  mechani- 
cal perfection  a  dramatic  form  originally  devel- 
oped in  the  folk-theatre. 

The  great  dramatists  have  ever  been  glad  to 
accept  the  mould  used  by  their  immediate  prede- 
cessors even  though  this  mould  was  soon  to  be 
cracked  by  their  purer  metal  and  cast  aside. 
Sophocles  and  Shakspere  and  Moli^re  each  of 
them  inherited  a  traditional  type  of  play  and  ac- 
cepted it  unhesitatingly.    Their  mastery  of  their 


128  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

art  and  their  mightier  endowment  enabled  them 
later  to  make  over  anew  the  traditional  form 
they  had  assimilated  early  and  to  stamp  it  with 
their  own  image  and  superscription,  and  to  pass 
it  along  to  their  successors  enlarged  and  enriched. 
Like  the  architects  of  genius,  these  dramatists 
of  genius  began  where  their  uninspired  contem- 
poraries left  off ;  and  probably  the  dramatists 
have  felt  the  necessity  of  accepting  the  current 
traditional  way  of  doing  things,  even  more  than 
the  architects,  for  whereas  the  architect  may  be 
dependent  only  on  a  single  patron,  and  may 
therefore  persuade  him  to  permit  a  violent  de- 
parture from  the  customary  practice,  the  drama- 
tists dare  not  risk  anything  freakish  or  abnormal 
since  their  appeal  is  to  the  public  as  a  whole, 
and  the  public  as  a  whole  is  unexpugnably  con- 
servative. It  is  the  privilege  of  the  unliterary 
playmaker  who  provides  the  program  of  the 
folk-theatre  to  be  educating  a  public  for  the 
later  and  more  literary  dramatist  who  is  going 
to  supersede  him.  As  Froude  puts  it  with  his 
usual  impressiveness — "  No  great  general  ever 
arose  out  of  a  nation  of  cowards ;  no  great 
statesman  or  philosopher  out  of  a  nation  of 
fools ;  no  great  artist  out  of  a  nation  of  materi- 
alists; no  great  dramatist  except  when  the 
drama  was  the  passion  of  the  people."     And  it 


THE   IMPORTANCE   OF   THE    FOLK-THEATRE       1 29 

ought  to  be  evident  that  the  drama  can  never 
become  the  passion  of  the  people,  unless  the  un- 
literary  playwright  of  the  folk-theatre  has  gone 
before,  training  the  players,  making  ready  the 
play-houses,  and,  above  all,  arousing  the  interest 
and  expectancy  of  the  public. 

To  admit  that  the  folk-theatre  is  important, 
to  seek  to  learn  how  it  had  its  being,  to  recog- 
nize that  there  are  various  stages  of  its  devel- 
opment open  to  our  study  even  at  this  late  day, 
to  spy  out  the  secret  of  its  power  to  please  the 
people,  to  grasp  the  vital  fact  that  the  drama  is 
something  still  alive  and  to  be  observed  best  in 
its  living  manifestations  on  the  stage,  to  do 
these  things  is  at  least  to  make  an  effort  to  gain 
an  understanding  of  the  fundamental  principles 
of  the  dramaturgic  art.  It  is  the  obvious  ab- 
sence of  any  such  understanding,  of  any  appre- 
ciation of  the  conditions  under  which  plays  are 
composed  and  produced,  and  of  the  reasons  why 
they  have  succeeded  or  failed  when  actually 
acted  in  the  theatre — it  is  the  absence  of  this 
understanding  and  appreciation  which  vitiates 
so  many  of  the  scholarly  attempts  to  elucidate 
the  masterpieces  of  dramatic  poetry. 

(1900.) 


TWO  FRENCH  THEATRICAL  CRITICS 


[This  pair  of  papers  is  here  rescued  from  an  earlier  volume  of 
*  Studies  of  the  Stage,'  now  out  of  print.] 


TWO  FRENCH  THEATRICAL  CRITICS 
I.— M.  FRANCISQUE  SARCEY 

To  attempt  a  portrait  of  a  man  of  letters  after 
the  subject  has  already  sat  to  two  limners  as  ac- 
complished as  Mr.  Henry  James  and  M.  Jules 
Lemaitre  is  venturesome  and  savors  of  conceit ; 
but  nearly  fifteen  years  have  passed  since  Mr. 
James  made  his  off-hand  thumb-nail  sketch  of 
M.  Sarcey,  and  M.  Lemaitre's  more  recent  and 
more  elaborate  portraiture  in  pastels  was  in- 
tended to  be  seen  of  Parisians  only.  Moreover, 
Mr.  James,  although  he  praises  M.  Sarcey,  does 
so  with  many  reserves,  not  to  say  a  little  grudg- 
ingly; he  even  echoes  the  opinion  once  current 
in  Paris,  that  M.  Sarcey  is  heavy — an  opinion 
which  M.  Lemaitre  denounces  and  disproves. 

It  is  in  person  that  M.  Sarcey  is  heavy — in 
body,  not  in  mind.  He  is  portly  and  thick-set, 
but  not  thick-witted.  He  is  short-sighted  physi- 
cally, but  no  critic  has  keener  insight.  His  judg- 
ments are  as   solid  and  as   firm-footed  as  his 


134  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

tread.  Sainte-Beuve  has  indicated  the  differ- 
ence between  the  "grave,  learned,  definitive** 
criticism  which  penetrates  and  explains  and 
**  the  more  alert  and  more  lightly  armed  "  criti- 
cism which  gives  the  note  to  contemporary 
thought.  It  is  in  the  former  class,  among  the 
"  grave,  learned,  definitive  "  critics,  that  M.  Sar- 
cey  must  be  placed,  but  his  serious  and  elabo- 
rate decisions  are  expressed  with  perhaps  as 
much  liveliness  and  as  much  point  as  any  one 
of  the  "more  alert  and  more  lightly  armed" 
may  display.  M.  Sarcey's  wit  is  Voltairean  in 
its  quality,  in  its  directness,  and  in  its  ease. 
Though  his  arm  is  strong  to  smite  a  cutting 
blow  if  need  be,  yet  more  often  than  not  it  is 
with  the  tip  of  the  blade  that  he  punctures  his 
adversary,  fighting  fairly  and  breaking  through 
the  guard  by  skill  of  fence. 

And  of  fighting  M.  Sarcey  has  had  his  fill 
since  he  entered  journalism,  more  than  thirty 
years  ago.  Born  in  1828,  he  was  admitted  to 
the  Normal  School  in  1848  in  the  class  with 
Taine  and  Edmond  About.  For  seven  years 
after  his  graduation,  in  1 851,  he  served  as  a  pro- 
fessor in  several  small  towns,  constantly  involved 
in  difficulties  with  the  officials  of  the  Second 
Empire.  In  1858  he  gave  up  the  desk  of  the 
teacher  for  that  of  the  journalist,  and  coming  up 


M.    FRANCISQUE   SARCEY  1 35 

to  Paris  by  the  aid  and  advice  of  About,  he  be- 
gan to  write  for  the  Figaro.  The  next  year 
the  Opifiion  Nationale  was  started,  and  M.  Sar- 
cey  became  its  dramatic  critic.  In  1 867  he  trans- 
ferred his  services  to  the  Ternps^  which  is  indis- 
putably the  ablest  and  most  dignified  of  all 
Parisian  newspapers ;  and  to  the  Temps,  in  the 
number  which  bears  the  date  of  Monday  and 
which  appears  on  Sunday  afternoon,  M.  Sarcey 
has  contributed  for  now  nearly  a  quarter  of  a 
century  a  weekly  review  of  the  theatres,  slowly 
gaining  in  authority  until  for  a  score  of  years  at 
least  his  primacy  in  Paris  as  a  dramatic  critic 
has  been  beyond  question. 

In  addition  to  this  hebdomadal  essay  M.  Sar- 
cey has  descended  daily  into  the  thick  of  con- 
temporary polemics.  He  writes  an  article  nearly 
every  day  on  the  topic  of  the  hour.  When  About 
started  the  XIX*^  Siccle  after  the  Prussian  war, 
M.  Sarcey  was  his  chief  editorial  contributor, 
leading  a  lively  campaign  against  administrative 
abuses  of  all  kinds  and  exposing  sharply  the 
blunders  of  the  ecclesiastical  propaganda.  He 
has  little  taste  for  party  politics,  which  seem  to 
him  arid  and  fruitless ;  but  in  the  righting  of 
wrongs  he  is  indefatigable,  and  in  the  discussion 
of  urban  improvements,  entering  with  ardor  into 
all  questions  of  water  supplies,  sewerage  and  the 


136  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

like.  And  to  the  consideration  of  all  these  prob- 
lems he  brings  the  broad  common-sense,  the 
stalwart  logic,  the  robust  energy  which  are  his 
chief  characteristics.  He  has  common-sense  in 
a  most  uncommon  degree ;  and  its  exercise  might 
be  monotonous  if  it  were  not  enlivened  by  ironic 
and  playful  wit. 

Calling  on  him  one  day  a  few  summers  ago, 
and  being  hospitably  received  in  the  spacious 
library  which  his  friend  M.  Charles  Gamier,  the 
architect  of  the  Opera,  has  arranged  for  him  in 
the  wide-windowed  studio  of  a  house  purchased 
by  him  from  the  painter  who  had  built  it  for  his 
own  use,  M.  Sarcey  told  me  that  he  was  a  lit- 
tle surprised  to  discover  that  such  reputation  as 
he  might  have  outside  of  his  own  country  was 
chiefly  as  a  dramatic  critic,  whereas  in  France  he 
was  known  rather  as  a  working  journalist.  Sit- 
ting on  the  broad,  square  lounge  below  the  wide 
window — the  famous  Divan  Rouge  of  which  M. 
Sarcey  himself  has  told  the  legend  in  the  pages 
of  a  French  review — I  suggested  that  perhaps 
this  was  owing  to  the  merely  local  interest  of 
the  subjects  the  daily  journalist  was  forced  to 
deal  with,  while  the  Parisian  dramatic  critic  dis- 
cussed plays,  many  of  which  were  likely  to  be 
exported  far  beyond  the  boundaries  of  France 
and  beyond  the  limits  of  the  French  language. 


M.    FRANCISQUE   SARCEY  1 37 

I  asked  him  also  how  it  was  that  he  had  never 
made  any  collection  of  his  dramatic  criticisms, 
or  even  a  selection  from  them,  as  Jules  Janin 
and  Thdophile  Gautier  had  done  in  the  past, 
and  as  Auguste  Vitu  of  the  Figaro  and  M.  Jules 
Lemaitre  of  the  Debats  had  more  recently  at- 
tempted, 

1  regret  that  I  cannot  recall  the  exact  words 
of  M.  Sarcey's  answer,  although  my  recollection 
of  the  purport  of  his  remarks  is  distinct  enough. 
He  said  that  he  had  not  collected  his  weekly 
articles  or  even  made  a  selection  from  them  be- 
cause they  were  journalism  and  not  literature  : 
the  essential  difference  between  journalism  and 
literature  being  that  the  newspaper  is  meant  for 
the  moment  only,  while  the  book  is  intended  for 
all  time,  or  as  much  of  it  as  may  be;  he  wrote 
for  the  Temps  his  exact  opinion  at  the  minute 
of  the  writing,  and  having  in  view  all  the  circum- 
stances of  the  hour.  He  said  that  in  a  book  an 
author  might  be  moderate  in  assertion,  but  that 
in  a  newspaper,  which  would  be  thrown  away 
between  sunrise  and  sunset,  a  writer  at  times 
must  needs  force  the  note;  and  when  it  was 
worth  while,  he  must  be  ready  to  declare  his 
opinion  loudly,  with  insistence  and  with  undue 
emphasis.  Of  this  privilege  he  had  availed  him- 
self in  the  Teynps^  and  this  was  one  reason  why 


138  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

he  did  not  wish  to  see  his  newspaper  articles  re- 
vived after  they  had  their  done  work.  (Here  I 
feel  it  proper  to  note  that  a  careful  reading  of  M. 
Sarcey's  feuilletons  every  week  for  now  nearly 
fourteen  years  has  shown  me  that  although  his 
enthusiasm  may  seem  at  times  a  little  over- 
strained, it  is  never  factitious  and  it  is  never  for 
an  unworthy  object.) 

A  second  reason  M.  Sarcey  gave  for  letting 
his  dramatic  criticisms  remain  in  the  back  num- 
bers of  a  daily  paper  is  that  he  always  gave  his 
opinion  frankly  and  fully  at  the  instant  when  his 
impressions  crystallized,  and  that  he  sometimes 
changed  these  opinions  when  a  play  was  revived 
or  when  a  player  was  seen  in  a  new  part.  "  Now, 
if  I  reprinted  my  feuilletons,"  said  he,  laughing, 
"I  should  lose  the  right  to  contradict  my- 
self." 

"To  look  at  all  sides,"  Lowell  tells  us,  "and 
to  distrust  the  verdict  of  a  single  mood,  is,  no 
doubt,  the  duty  of  a  critic,"  but  the  hasty  re- 
view of  a  play  penned  before  sunrise,  while  the 
printer's  boy  waits  for  copy,  is  of  necessity  the 
verdict  of  a  single  mood;  and  this  is  why  M. 
Sarcey  feels  the  need  of  keeping  his  mind  open 
to  fresh  impressions,  and  of  holding  himself  in 
readiness  to  modify  his  opinion  if  good  cause  is 
shown  for  a  reversal  of  the  previous  decision. 


M.    FRANaSQUE   SARCEY  1 39 

And  the  criticism  to  which  Lowell  refers  is,  in 
one  sense,  literature,  while  the  rapid  reviewing 
of  contemporary  art  can  never  be  more  than 
journalism,  tinctured  always  with  the  belief  that 
what  is  essential  is  news — first  its  collection,  and 
secondarily  a  comment  upon  it. 

In  this  same  conversation  with  M.  Sarcey  in 
his  library  he  told  me  that  he  had  planned  a 
book  on  the  drama — *  A  History  of  Theatrical 
Conventions'  was  to  be  its  exact  title,  I  think — 
but  that  he  had  done  little  or  nothing  toward 
it.  The  drama,  like  every  other  art,  is  based 
upon  the  passing  of  an  implied  agreement  be- 
tween the  public  and  the  artist  by  which  the 
former  allows  the  latter  certain  privileges ;  and  in 
no  art  are  these  conventions  more  necessary  and 
more  obvious  than  in  the  art  of  the  stage.  The 
dramatist  has  but  a  few  minutes  in  which  to 
show  his  action,  and  he  can  take  the  spectator 
to  but  a  few  places ;  therefore  he  has  to  select, 
to  condense,  to  intensify  beyond  all  nature ;  and 
the  spectator  has  to  make  allowances  for  the 
needful  absence  of  the  fourth  wall  of  the  room 
in  which  the  scene  passes,  for  the  directness  of 
speech,  for  the  omission  of  the  non-essentials 
which  in  real  life  cumber  man's  every  movement. 
Certain  of  these  conventions  are  permanent,  im- 
mutable, inevitable,  being  of  the  essence  of  the 


I40  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

contract,  as  we  lawyers  say,  inherent  in  any  con- 
ceivable form  of  dramatic  art.  Certain  others  are 
accidental,  temporary,  different  in  various  coun- 
tries and  in  various  ages. 

A  history  of  theatrical  conventions  as  M.  Sar- 
cey  might  tell  it  would  be  the  story  of  dramatic 
evolution  and  of  the  modification  of  the  art  of 
the  stage  in  accord  with  the  changing  environ- 
ment ;  it  would  be  as  vital  and  as  pregnant  and 
as  stimulating  a  treatise  on  the  drama  and  its 
essential  principles  as  one  could  wish.  I  ex- 
pressed to  M.  Sarcey  my  eagerness  to  hold  such 
a  book  in  my  hand  as  soon  as  might  be.  He 
laughed  again  heartily,  and  returned  that  he 
had  made  little  progress,  and  that  he  was  in  no 
hurry  to  set  forth  his  ideas  nakedly  by  them- 
selves and  systematically  co-ordinated.  *'  If  I 
once  formulated  my  theories,"  he  said,  "with 
what  could  I  fill  my  feuilleton — those  twelve 
broad  columns  of  the  Temps  every  week?" 

What  M.  Sarcey  has  not  yet  done  for  him- 
self the  late  Becq  de  Fouqui^res  attempted  in  a 
book  on  *  L'Art  de  la  Mise  en  Sc^ne,'  the  princi- 
ples laid  down  in  which  are  derived  mainly  from 
M.  Sarcey's  essays  in  the  Temps.  M.  de  Fou- 
qui^res,  it  is  to  be  noted,  had  not  M.  Sarcey's 
knowledge,  his  authority,  his  vigor,  or  his  style, 
but  his  treatise  is  logical  and  valuable,  and  may 


M.    FRANCISQUE   SARCEY  14I 

be  recommended  heartily  to  all  American  stu- 
dents of  the  stage. 

That  M.  Sarcey  should  ever  feel  any  difficulty 
in  filling  his  allotted  space  is  inconceivable  to 
those  who  wonder  weekly  at  his  abundance,  his 
variety,  and  his  overflowing  information.  The 
post  of  dramatic  critic  has  been  held  in  Paris  by 
many  distinguished  men,  who  for  the  most  part 
regarded  it  with  distaste  and  merely  as  a  disa- 
greeable livelihood.  Theophile  Gautier  was 
frequent  in  his  denunciation  of  his  theatrical 
servitude,  speaking  of  himself  as  one  toiling  in 
the  galley  of  journalism  and  chained  to  the  oar 
of  the  feuilleton.  In  like  manner  Theodore  de 
Banville  and  M.  Francois  Copp6e  cried  aloud 
at  their  slavery,  and  sought  every  occasion  for 
an  excursus  from  the  prescribed  theatrical  theme. 
Even  M.  Jules  Lemaitre  now  and  again  strays 
from  the  path  to  discuss  in  the  D^bats  a  novel 
or  a  poem  not  strictly  within  the  jurisdiction 
of  the  dramatic  critic.  M.  Sarcey  never  faints 
in  his  allegiance  to  the  stage,  and  he  is  never 
short  of  material  for  examination.  If  there  are 
no  novelties  at  the  theatres,  there  may  be  new 
books  about  the  stage.  Or  if  these  fail  there 
are  questions  of  theatrical  administration.  Or, 
in  default  of  everything  else,  the  Comedie-Fran- 
gaise  is  always  open,  and  in  the  dull  days  of  the 


142  ASPECTS    OF   FICTION 

summer  it  acts  the  older  plays,  the  comedies 
and  tragedies  of  the  classical  repertory,  and  in 
these  M.  Sarcey  finds  many  a  peg  on  which  to 
hang  a  disquisition  on  dramatic  esthetics.  I  will 
not  say  that  I  have  not  found  the  same  truth 
presented  more  than  once  in  the  seven  hundred 
of  M.  Sarcey 's  weekly  essays  that  I  have  read 
and  preserved,  or  the  same  moral  enforced  more 
than  once ;  but  that  is  a  pretty  poor  truth  which 
will  not  bear  more  than  one  repetition. 

Perhaps  the  first  remark  a  regular  reader  of 
M.  Sarcey*s  weekly  review  finds  himself  making 
is  that  the  critic  has  a  profound  knowledge  of 
the  art  of  the  stage.  Of  a  certainty  the  second 
is  to  the  effect  that  the  critic  very  evidently  de- 
lights in  his  work,  is  obviously  glad  to  go  to  the 
theatre  and  pleased  to  express  his  opinion  on 
the  play  and  the  performance.  No  dramatic 
critic  was  ever  more  conscientious  than  M.  Sar- 
cey, none  was  ever  as  indefatigable.  Often  he 
returns  to  see  a  piece  a  second  time  before  re- 
cording his  opinion  in  print,  ready  to  modify 
his  first  impression  and  quick  to  note  the  effect 
produced  on  the  real  public,  the  broad  body  of 
average  play-goers  but  sparsely  represented  on 
first  nights. 

Next  to  his  enjoyment  of  his  work  and  his 
conscience  in  the  discharge  of  his  duty,  the  chief 


M.    FRANCISQUE    SARCEY  1 43 

characteristic  of  M.  Sarcey  is  his  extraordinary 
knowledge,  his  wide  acquaintance  with  the  his- 
tory of  the  theatre  in  Greece,  in  Rome,  and  in 
France,  his  close  hold  on  the  thread  of  dramatic 
development,  and  his  firm  grasp  of  the  vital 
principles  of  theatric  art.  He  understands  as 
no  one  else  the  theory  of  the  drama,  the  why 
and  the  wherefore  of  every  cog-wheel  of  dramatic 
mechanism.  He  seizes  the  beauty  of  technical 
detail,  and  he  is  fond  of  making  this  plain  to 
the  ordinary  play-goer,  who  is  conscious  solely 
of  the  result  and  careless  of  the  means.  He  has 
a  marvellous  faculty  of  seizing  the  central  situa- 
tion of  a  play  and  of  setting  this  forth  boldly, 
dwelling  on  the  subsidiary  developments  of  the 
plot  only  in  so  far  as  they  are  needful  for  the 
proper  exposition  of  the  more  important  point. 
By  directing  all  the  light  on  this  dominating 
and  culminating  situation,  the  one  essential  and 
pregnant  part  of  the  piece,  M.  Sarcey  manages 
to  convey  to  the  reader  some  notion  of  the  effect 
of  the  acted  play  upon  the  audience — a  task  far 
above  the  calibre  of  the  ordinary  theatrical  crit- 
ics, who  content  themselves  generally  with  a 
hap-hazard  and  hasty  summary  of  the  plot,  bald 
and  barren.  From  M.  Sarcey's  criticism  of  a 
play  in  Paris  it  is  possible  for  an  intelligent 
reader  in  New  York  to  appreciate  the  effect  of 


144  ASPECTS    OF   FICTION 

the  performance  and  to  understand  the  causes 
of  its  success  or  its  failure. 

His  criticism — even  when  one  is  most  in  dis- 
agreement with  his  opinions— is  always  informed 
with  an  exact  appreciation  of  the  possibilities 
and  the  limitations  of  the  acted  drama.  Here 
is  M.  Sarcey's  real  originality  as  a  theatrical 
critic  —  that  he  criticises  the  acted  drama  as 
something  to  be  acted.  With  the  possible  ex- 
ception of  Lessing — whom  he  once  praised  to 
me  most  cordially,  declaring  that  he  was  de- 
lighted whenever  he  took  down  the  *  Drama- 
turgic' and  chanced  upon  some  dictum  of  the 
great  German  critic  confirmatory  of  one  of  his 
own  theories — with  the  exception  of  Lessing 
and  of  G.  H.  Lewes,  M.  Sarcey  is  the  first  mod- 
ern dramatic  critic  of  literary  equipment  who 
did  not  consider  a  tragedy  or  a  comedy  merely 
as  literature  and  apart  from  its  effect  when  acted. 
La  Harpe  and  Geoffroy  might  have  contented 
themselves  with  reading  at  home  the  plays  they 
criticised  for  all  the  effect  of  the  performance  to 
be  detected  in  their  comment.  Janin  and  Gau- 
tier  were  little  better :  to  them  a  drama  was  a 
specimen  of  literature,  to  be  judged  by  the  rules 
and  methods  applicable  to  other  specimens  of 
literature. 

Now,  no  view  could  be  more  unjust  to  the 


M.    FRANCISQUE   SARCEY  1 45 

dramatist.  A  play  is  written  not  to  be  read, 
primarily,  but  to  be  acted ;  and  if  it  is  a  good 
play  it  is  seen  to  fullest  advantage  only  when  it 
is  acted.  M.  Coquelin  has  recently  pointed  out 
that  if  Shakspere  and  Moli^re,  the  greatest 
two  dramatists  that  ever  lived,  were  both  care- 
less as  to  the  printing  of  their  plays,  it  was  per- 
haps because  both  knew  that  these  plays  were 
written  for  the  theatre,  and  that  only  in  the 
theatre  could  they  be  judged  properly.  Seen  by 
the  light  of  the  lamps  a  play  has  quite  another 
complexion  from  that  it  bears  in  the  library. 
Passages  pale  and  dull,  it  may  be,  when  read 
coldly  by  the  eye,  are  lighted  by  the  inner  fire 
of  passion  when  presented  in  the  theatre ;  and 
the  solid  structure  of  action,  without  which  a 
drama  is  naught,  may  stand  forth  in  bolder  re- 
lief on  the  stage.  A  play  in  the  hand  of  the 
reader  and  a  play  before  the  eye  of  the  spec- 
tator are  two  very  different  things ;  and  the  dif- 
ference between  them  bids  fair  to  grow  apace 
with  the  increasing  attention  paid  nowadays  to 
the  purely  pictorial  side  of  dramatic  art,  to  the 
costumes  and  the  scenery,  to  the  illustrative 
business  and  the  ingenious  management  of  the 
lights.  No  one  knows  better  than  M.  Sarcey 
how  sharp  the  difference  is  between  the  play  on 
the  stage  and  the  play  in  the  closet,  and  no  one 


146  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

has  indicated  the  distinction  with  more  acumen. 
He  judges  the  play  before  him  as  it  impresses 
him  and  the  surrounding  play-goers  at  its  per- 
formance in  the  theatre,  and  not  as  it  might 
strike  him  on  perusal  alone  in  his  study. 

And  this  is  one  reason  why — if  it  were  neces- 
sary to  declare  the  order  of  the  critical  hierarchy 
— I  should  rank  M.  Sarcey  as  a  critic  of  the 
acted  drama  more  highly  than  any  British  critic 
even  of  the  great  days  of  British  dramatic  criti- 
cism, when  Lamb  and  Hazlitt  and  Leigh  Hunt 
were  practitioners  of  the  art.  The  task  of  Haz- 
litt and  of  Leigh  Hunt  was  far  different  from 
M.  Sarcey's.  The  English  drama  of  their  day 
was  so  feeble  that  few  except  professed  students 
of  theatrical  history  can  now  recall  the  names 
of  any  play  or  of  any  playwright  of  that  time ; 
and  therefore  the  critics  devoted  themselves  al- 
most altogether  to  an  analysis  of  the  beauties  of 
Shakspere  and  of  the  art  of  acting  as  revealed 
by  John  Philip  Kemble,  Sarah  Siddons,  and  Ed- 
mund Kean.  Lamb's  subtle  and  paradoxical 
essays  are  retrospective,  the  best  of  them,  and 
commemorate  performers  and  performances  held 
in  affectionate  remembrance.  He  wrote  little 
about  the  actual  present,  and  thus  he  avoided 
the  double  difficulty  of  dramatic  criticism  as  M. 
Sarcey  has  to  meet  it  to-day  in  France. 


M.    FRANaSQUE   SARCEY  1 47 

This  double  difficulty  is,  that  when  the  dra- 
matic critic  has  to  review  a  new  play  he  is  called 
upon  to  do  two  things  at  once,  each  incompati- 
ble with  the  other:  he  has  to  judge  the  play, 
which  he  knows  only  through  the  medium  of 
the  acting,  and  he  has  to  judge  the  acting,  which 
he  knows  only  as  it  is  shown  in  the  play  ;  and 
thus  there  is  a  double  liability  to  error.  Neither 
the  dramatist  nor  the  comedian  stands  before 
the  critic  simply  and  directly — each  can  be  seen 
only  as  the  other  is  able  and  willing  to  declare 
him.  It  may  be  said  that  the  dramatic  critic 
does  not  see  a  new  play — he  sees  only  a  per- 
formance, and  this  performance  may  be  good  or 
bad,  may  betray  the  author  or  reinforce  him, 
may  be  fairly  representative  of  his  work  and  his 
wishes,  or  may  not.  It  is  not  the  play  itself  that 
the  critic  sees — it  is  only  the  performance.  If  the 
play  is  in  print,  the  critic  may  correct  the  im- 
pression of  the  single  representation,  or  he  may 
do  so  if  the  play  be  revived.  Lamb  and  Hazlitt 
and  Leigh  Hunt,  dealing  almost  wholly  with  the 
comedies  and  tragedies  of  the  past,  all  of  which 
were  in  print  and  in  their  possession  for  quiet 
perusal,  had  a  far  easier  task  than  M.  Sarcey's — 
jthey  had  to  do  little  more  than  comment  upon 
fehe  acting  or  express  their  pre-existing  opinion  of 
the  play  itself.     M.  Sarcey  has  to  judge  both 


148  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

piece  and  the  acting  at  the  same  time,  and  he 
has  to  judge  the  piece  solely  through  the  me- 
dium of  the  acting,  and  the  acting  solely  through 
the  medium  of  the  piece ;  and  it  may  happen 
that  either  medium  refracts  irregularly.  Every 
actor,  every  dramatic  author,  every  theatrical 
manager  knows  that  there  are  "  ungrateful  parts  " 
and  "  parts  that  play  themselves."  Out  of  the 
former  the  best  actor  can  make  but  little,  and  in 
the  latter  the  defects  of  even  the  poorest  actor 
are  disguised. 

No  dramatic  critic  is  better  aware  of  this 
double  difficulty  than  M.  Sarcey,  and  no  one  is 
more  adroit  in  solving  it.  As  far  as  natural 
gifts  and  an  unprecedented  experience  can  avail, 
he  avoids  the  danger.  He  is  open-minded,  slow 
to  formulate  his  opinion,  and  always  ready  to 
give  a  play  or  a  player  a  rehearing.  He  is 
never  mean,  never  morose,  never  malignant. 
He  is  not  one  of  the  critics  who  attack  a  living 
author  with  the  callous  carelessness  with  which 
an  anatomist  goes  to  work  on  a  nameless  ca- 
daver. He  is  no  more  easy  to  please  than  any 
other  expert  whose  taste  is  fine,  though  his  sym- 
pathies are  broad  ;  but  when  he  is  pleased  he  is 
emphatic  in  praise.  It  was  in  the  '  Idle  Man,'  in 
his  wonderful  panegyric  of  Kean's  acting,  that 
Dana  said,  "  I  hold  it  to  be  a  low  and  wicked 


M.    FRANCISQUE   SARCEY  1 49 

thing  to  keep  back  from  merit  of  any  kind  its 
due  " ;  and  M.  Sarcey  is  of  Dana's  opinion.  He 
is  capable  of  dithyrambic  rhapsodies  of  eulogy 
when  he  is  trying  to  warm  up  the  Parisian  pub- 
lic to  a  proper  appreciation  of  M.  Meilhac's 
*  Gotte '  or  *  Ddcore,'  for  example ;  and  although 
nobody  can  love  New  York  more  than  I  do, 
sometimes  one  of  the  Temps  reviews  of  a  new 
play  at  the  Vaudeville,  of  a  revival  at  the  Odeon, 
or  of  a  first  appearance  at  the  Frangais  is  enough 
to  make  me  homesick  for  Paris. 

As  a  critic  even  of  the  drama,  M.  Sarcey  has 
his  limitations.  He  is  now  and  then  insular — 
Paris  (like  New  York)  had  its  origin  on  an 
island.  At  times  he  is  dogmatic  to  the  verge  of 
despotism.  He  has  the  defects  of  his  qualities ; 
and  the  first  of  his  qualities  is  a  robust  com- 
mon-sense, which  is  sometimes  a  little  common- 
place and  sometimes  again  a  little  overwhelm- 
ing, a  little  intolerant.  Common-sense  is  an  old 
failing  of  the  French.  "  We  have  almost  all  of 
us,"  says  M.  Jules  Lemaitre,  "  more  or  less  Mal- 
herbe,  Boileau,  Voltaire,  and  M.  Thiers  in  our 
marrow."  A  characteristic  of  all  these  typical 
Frenchmen  was  pugnacity,  and  this  is  one  of  M. 
Sarcey 's  most  valuable  qualities.  He  fights  fair, 
but  he  fights  hard.  His  long  campaign  against 
M.  Duquesnel  as  the  manager  of  the  Od6on  and 


150  ASPECTS    OF   FICTION 

his  repeated  attacks  on  the  theories  of  the  late 
M.  Perrin,  until  the  death  of  that  administrator 
of  the  Comedie-Frangaise,  are  memorable  in- 
stances of  M.  Sarcey's  tenacity.  They  are  in- 
stances also  of  his  sagacity,  for  time  has  proved 
the  truth  of  his  contentions.  Again,  when  M. 
Zola  made  a  bitter  and  personal  retort  to  a  plain- 
spoken  criticism,  M.  Sarcey  returned  an  answer 
as  good-tempered  as  any  one  could  wish,  but  as 
convincing  and  as  cutting  as  any  of  M.  Zola's 
many  opponents  could  desire.  When  M.  Sarcey 
picks  up  the  gauntlet,  he  handles  his  adversary 
without  gloves. 

In  the  reply  to  M.  Zola,  as  elsewhere,  M.  Sar- 
cey confessed  his  abiding  weakness— the  incura- 
ble habit  of  heterophemy  which  makes  him  mis- 
call names  in  almost  every  article  he  writes, 
setting  down  "  Edmond "  when  it  should  be 
"  Edward,"  and  the  like.  But  blunders  of  this 
sort  are  but  trifles  which  any  alert  proof-reader 
might  check,  and  which  every  careful  reader  can 
correct  for  himself.  They  are  all  of  a  piece  with 
M.  Sarcey's  writing,  which  abounds  in  familiari- 
ties, in  slang,  in  the  technical  terms  of  the  stage, 
in  happy-go-lucky  allusions  often  exceedingly 
felicitous,  and  in  frequent  anecdotes  from  his 
wide  reading  or  from  his  own  experience.  The 
result  is  a  style  of  transparent  ease  and  of  indis- 


M.    FRANCISQUE   SARCEY  15I 

putable  sincerity.  Nobody  was  ever  in  doubt 
as  to  his  meaning  at  any  time,  or  in  doubt  as  to 
the  reason  why  he  meant  what  he  said.  To  this 
sincerity  M.  Sarcey  referred  in  his  reply  to  M. 
Zola,  and  to  it  he  owes,  as  he  there  declared, 
much  of  his  authority  as  a  dramatic  critic.  With 
the  public,  intelligence  and  knowledge  count  for 
much,  and  skill  tells  also,  and  so  does  wit;  but 
nothing  is  as  important  to  a  critic  as  a  repu- 
tation for  integrity,  for  frankness,  for  absolute 
honesty  in  the  expression  of  his  opinions. 

To  keep  this  reputation  quite  free  from  sus- 
picion M.  Sarcey  declined  to  solicit  the  chair  of 
Emile  Augier  in  the  French  Academy.  In  a 
dignified  and  pathetic  letter  to  the  public,  he 
declared  that  although  he  believed  that  most  of 
the  dramatists  who  belonged  to  the  Forty  Im- 
mortals would  vote  for  him,  and  although  he 
believed  that  both  before  his  candidacy  and 
after  his  election  he  could  criticise  the  plays 
of  these  dramatists  as  freely  as  he  did  now,  yet 
he  did  not  believe  that  the  public  would  credit 
him  with  this  fortitude.  **  The  authority  of 
the  critic  lies  in  the  confidence  of  the  public," 
he  wrote;  and  if  the  public  doubted  whether 
he  would  speak  the  truth  and  the  whole  truth 
as  frankly  after  he  had  been  a  candidate  or  after 
he  had  become  an  Academician,  his  opinion 


152  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

would  lose  half  its  weight.  To  guard  his  free- 
dom he  told  me  once  he  had  refused  all  honors, 
even  the  cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honor.  He  de- 
clared in  this  letter  that  he  hesitated  long,  and 
that  he  knew  the  sacrifice  he  was  making.  If 
journalism  had  been  without  a  representative  in 
the  Academy,  perhaps  he  might  have  felt  it  his 
duty  to  be  a  candidate,  but  John  Lemoine  was 
one  of  the  Forty,  and  there  were  already  two 
or  three  other  journalists  drawing  nigh  to  the 
Academy,  "who  will  fill  most  brilliantly  the 
place  I  give  up  to  them."  He  concluded  by 
declaring  that  his  ambition  was  to  have  on  his 
tombstone  the  two  words  which  would  sum  up 
his  career — "  Professor  and  Journalist." 

(1890.) 


II.— M.  JULES  LEMATtRE 

In  the  evolution  of  literature  three  kinds  of 
critics  have  been  developed.  First  in  point  of 
time  came  the  critic  who  spoke  as  one  having 
authority,  who  appealed  to  absolute  standards 
of  taste,  who  had  no  doubt  as  to  the  force  of  his 
criterions,  who  judged  according  to  the  strict 
letter  of  the  law,  and  who  willingly  advised  a 
poet  to  put  his  Pegasus  out  to  grass  or  ordered 
a  writer  of  prose  to  send  his  stalking-horse  to 
the  knacker.  This  critic  believed  in  definite 
legislation  for  literature,  and  sometimes — when 
his  name  was  Horace  or  Boileau  or  Pope — he 
codified  the  scattered  laws,  that  all  might  obey 
them  understandingly.  Macaulay  was  perhaps 
the  last  British  critic  of  this  class;  and  even 
now  many  of  his  minor  imitators  hand  down 
their  hebdomadal  judgments  in  the  broad  col- 
umns of  British  weeklies.  In  France  there  is 
to-day  a  man  of  force,  acuteness,  and  individu- 
ality, M.  Ferdinand  Bruneti^re,  who  accepts 
this  earlier  creed  of  criticism,  and  who  acts  up 
to  it  conscientiously  in  the  Revue  des  Deux 
Mondes. 


154  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

The  papal  infallibility  of  the  Essay  on  Criti- 
cism began  to  be  doubted  toward  the  end  of  the 
last  century.  Lessing,  for  one,  had  impulses  of 
revolt  against  the  rigidity  of  the  rules  by  which 
literature  was  limited ;  but  the  German  protest 
of  the  Schlegels,  for  instance,  was  rather  against 
the  restrictions  of  French  criticism  than  against 
a  narrow  method  of  appreciating  poetry.  Like 
the  Irish  clergyman  who  declared  himself  will- 
ing to  "renounce  the  errors  of  the  Church  of 
Rome  and  to  adopt  those  of  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land," most  of  the  writers  who  refused  to  be 
judged  by  the  precepts  of  Classicism  were  ready 
to  apply  with  equal  rigor  the  rules  of  Romanti- 
cism. But  in  time,  out  of  "the  welter  and  strug- 
gle of  faction  came  a  perception  of  a  new  truth 
— that  it  is  the  task  of  the  critic  not  to  judge, 
but  to  examine,  to  inquire,  to  investigate,  to  see 
the  object  as  it  really  is  and  to  consider  it  with 
disinterested  curiosity.  This  Sainte-Beuve  at- 
tempted, though  even  he  did  not  always  attain 
to  the  lofty  ideal  he  proclaimed ;  and  to  the 
same  chilly  height  Matthew  Arnold  tried  to 
reach,  saying  that  he  wished  to  decide  nothing 
as  of  his  "  own  authority ;  the  great  art  of  crit- 
icism is  to  get  one's  self  out  of  the  way  and  to 
let  humanity  decide." 

The  phrase  which  Dr.  Waldstein  quoted  from 


M.    JULES   LEMAItRE  155 

Spinoza  not  long  ago  as  characteristic  of  the 
scientific  mind — Neque  flere^  neque  ridere^  neque 
admirare^  neque  cofttemfierey  sed  intelligere 
(Neither  to  weep  nor  to  laugh,  neither  to  ad- 
mire nor  to  despise,  but  to  understand) — this 
may  serve  to  indicate  the  aim  of  scientific  criti- 
cism which  judges  not,  which  expresses  no  opin- 
ions, which  does  not  take  sides,  which  merely 
sets  down,  with  the  arid  precision  of  an  affidavit, 
the  facts  as  these  are  revealed  by  a  qualitative 
analysis.  Unfortunately,  criticism  as  impersonal 
as  this  is  impossible;  no  man  can  make  a  mere 
machine  of  himself  to  register  in  vacuo.  "If 
there  were  any  recognized  standard  in  criticism, 
as  in  apothecaries'  measure,  so  that,  by  adding 
a  grain  of  praise  to  this  scale  or  taking  away  a 
scruple  of  blame  from  that,  we  could  make  the 
balance  manifestly  even  in  the  eyes  of  all  men, 
it  might  be  worth  while  to  weigh  Hannibal," 
Mr.  Lowell  tells  us;  "but  when  each  of  us 
stamps  his  own  weights  and  warrants  the  im- 
partiality of  his  own  scales,  perhaps  the  experi- 
ment may  be  wisely  foregone." 

The  natural  reaction  from  an  impossibly  cal- 
lous scientific  criticism  which  sought  to  sup- 
press the  personality  of  the  critic  was  a  criticism 
which  was  frankly  individual.  This  is  the  third 
kind  of  criticism ;  it  abdicates  all  inherited  au- 


I 


156  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

thority  and  it  does  not  pretend  to  scientific  ex- 
actitude. It  recognizes  that  no  standard  is  final, 
and  that  there  is  no  disputing  about  tastes.  It 
is  aware  that  in  the  higher  criticism  as  in  the 
higher  education  there  has  been  an  abolition  of 
the  marking  system,  and  that  the  critic  is  no 
longer  a  pedant  or  a  pedagogue  sending  one 
author  up  to  the  head  of  his  class  and  setting 
another  in  the  corner  with  a  fool's  cap  on  his 
brow.  It  declares  the  honest  impression  of  the 
individual  at  the  moment  of  writing,  not  con- 
cealing the  fact  that  even  this  may  be  different 
at  another  time.  In  reality  Poe  was  a  critic  of 
this  type,  though  he  lacked  frankness,  and  with 
characteristic  charlatanry  was  prompt  to  appeal 
to  the  immutable  standards  to  verify  his  own 
vagaries. 

The  three  types  of  criticism  have  been  evolved 
inevitably  one  out  of  the  other;  and  the  devel- 
opment of  the  third  kind  has  not  driven  out 
the  practitioners  of  the  first  and  second.  Critics 
of  all  three  classes  exist  at  present  side  by  side 
in  France,  England,  and  America,  disputing  to- 
gether daily  in  the  schools.  Yet  the  man  is  of 
more  importance  than  the  method ;  and  a  born 
critic  can  bend  any  theory  of  his  art  to  suit  his 
purpose.  Boileau  and  Sainte-Beuve  were  both 
good  critics,  and  Matthew  Arnold  was  a  good 


M.    JULES   LEMaItRE  1 57 

critic ;  and  so  was  Lowell,  who  seemed  rather 
an  eclectic,  not  firm  in  following  any  one  creed. 
To  which  theory  a  man  gives  in  allegiance  now- 
adays is  mainly  a  question  of  temperament.  In 
France,  as  it  happens,  the  most  brilliant  critic 
of  the  younger  generation,  M.  Jules  Lemaitre, 
belongs  to  the  third  class.  M.  Lemaitre  is  a  tri- 
umphant exemplar  of  individual  criticism,  giv- 
ing his  opinions  for  what  they  are  worth,  and 
presenting  them  so  forcibly,  so  picturesquely, 
so  pleasantly,  that  at  least  they  are  always 
worth  listening  to.  There  is  no  pose  in  his 
frankness,  and  his  apparent  inconsequence  is 
open  and  honest. 

In  some  respects  M.  Jules  Lemaitre  is  a  typ- 
ical Frenchman  of  letters.  He  has  the  ease, 
the  grace,  the  wit,  the  lightness  of  touch,  and 
the  certainty  of  execution  characteristic  of  the 
best  French  authors.  Behind  these  charms  he 
has  the  love  of  clearness,  of  order,  of  symmetry 
— in  a  word,  of  form — which  is  among  the  most 
marked  of  French  qualities.  He  dislikes  ex- 
travagance of  any  kind  ;  he  hates  harshness, 
violence,  brutality.  He  inherits  the  Latin  tra- 
dition, and  he  has  fed  fat  on  the  poetry  of 
Greece  and  Rome.  He  has  none  of  the  liking 
of  his  contemporary,  M.  Paul  Bourget,  for  for- 
eign countries,  and  none  of  M.  Bourget's  cu- 


158  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

riosity  as  to  foreign  literature.  M.  Lemaitre  is 
content  to  have  M.  "  Pierre  Loti "  do  his  trav- 
elh'ng  for  him,  or  to  let  Guy  de  Maupassant  go 
abroad  as  his  proxy. 

M.  Jules  Lemaitre  has  not  yet  "come  to  forty 
years."  He  is  still  a  young  man.  He  was  born 
in  1853,  in  the  little  village  of  Vennecy,  on  the 
edge  of  the  forest  of  Orleans.  He  attended 
school  at  Orleans  and  then  in  Paris,  and  when 
he  was  nineteen  he  entered  the  Normal  School, 
which  of  late  years  has  given  many  a  brilliant 
man  to  French  literature.  In  1875,  at  the  age 
of  twenty-two,  he  was  graduated  from  the  Nor- 
mal School  with  high  honors,  and  he  was  at 
once  sent  to  the  Lyc6e  of  Havre  as  professor  of 
rhetoric.  Here  he  stayed  five  years  teaching, 
and  yet  finding  time  to  write  that  first  volume 
of  verse  with  which  most  authors  begin  their 
literary  career. 

In  1880  he  published  these  poems,  and  in  the 
same  year  he  was  promoted  and  sent  to  Algiers. 
In  1883  he  brought  out  a  second  book  of 
rhymes,  and  he  presented  his  double  theses  to 
the  Sorbonne,  whereupon  he  was  made  a  doctor 
of  letters.  The  thesis  in  French,  a  study  of  the 
plays  of  Dancourt  and  of  the  course  of  French 
comedy  after  the  death  of  Moliere,  was  quite 
unconventional  in  its  individuality,  as  any  one 


M.    JULES   LEMaItRE  1 59 

may  see  now  that  it  has  been  published.  He 
was  again  promoted,  but  he  already  thought  of 
giving  up  his  professorship  to  venture  into  lit- 
erature. In  1884  he  asked  for  leave  of  absence 
and  went  to  Paris,  where  he  began  to  contribute 
regularly  to  the  Revue  Bleue^  the  most  literary 
and  the  most  independent  of  French  weekly 
journals — as  far  as  may  be  the  Parisian  equiv- 
alent of  the  Nation,  In  a  very  few  weeks  he 
made  his  name  known  to  all  the  Parisians  who 
care  for  literature.  His  acute  analysis  of  Renan 
was  the  first  of  his  essays  to  attract  general  at- 
tention ;  and  when  he  followed  this  up  with 
equally  incisive  studies  of  M.  Zola  and  of  M. 
Georges  Ohnet,  he  was  at  once  accepted  as  one 
of  the  most  acute  of  contemporary  French  crit- 
ics. As  one  of  his  biographers  declares,  "  He 
was  unknown  in  October,  1884,  and  in  Decem- 
ber he  was  famous."  A  few  months  later,  when 
J.  J.  Weiss  resigned,  M.  Lemaitre  was  appoint- 
ed dramatic  critic  of  the  Jourfial  des  D^batSy 
the  position  long  held  by  Jules  Janin. 

His  contributions  to  the  Revue  Bleue  M.  Le- 
maitre has  four  times  gathered  into  volumes 
sent  forth  under  the  same  title,  *  Les  Contempo- 
rains.*  Selections  from  his  weekly  articles  in 
the  D^bats  have  also  been  collected  in  succes- 
sive volumes  called  *  Impressions  de  Theatre.* 


l6o  ASPECTS    OF   FICTION 

The  titles  he  has  given  to  these  two  series  of 
his  criticisms  reveal  the  aim  of  M.  Lemaitre  and 
his  range.  Those  whom  he  criticises  are  chief- 
ly his  contemporaries,  or  at  furthest  those  who 
have  deeply  and  immediately  influenced  the 
men  of  to-day ;  and  the  criticisms  themselves 
are  chiefly  his  impressions.  M.  Lemaitre  is  a 
man  of  the  nineteenth  century,  first  of  all,  and 
he  tells  his  fellow-men  how  the  books  and  the 
plays  of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  authors  and 
the  actors,  affect  him,  how  they  move  him — in 
short,  how  they  impress  him  at  the  moment  re- 
gardless of  any  change  of  opinion  which  may 
come  to  him  in  the  future. 

Sainte-Beuve  protests  against  those  who  bor- 
row ready-made  opinions ;  and  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  more  often  than  not  a  ready-made 
opinion  is  a  misfit.  M.  Jules  Lemaitre  has  his 
opinions  made  to  measure,  and  as  soon  as  he 
outgrows  them  they  are  cast  aside.  While  he 
wears  them  they  are  his  own,  and  not  in  cut, 
nor  cloth,  nor  style  are  they  commonplace. 
He  has  the  double  qualification  of  the  true 
critic — insight  and  equipment.  He  has  humor 
and  good-humor,  and  he  enjoys  the  play  of  his 
own  wit.  He  is  a  scholar  who  is  often  as  lively 
and  as  lawless  as  a  schoolboy.  He  is  at  once  a 
man  of  letters  and  a  man  of  the  world.     He 


M.    JULES    LEMaItRE  i6i 

hates  the  smell  of  the  lamp,  and  his  best  work 
has  the  flavor  of  the  good  talk  that  may  go  up 
the  chimney  when  there  is  a  wood  fire  on  the 
hearth.  As  he  gained  experience  and  authority 
he  has  become  less  emphatic,  and  he  hesitates 
more  before  coming  to  definite  conclusions. 
The  certainty  of  conviction  which  he  brought 
with  him  from  the  provinces  has  given  way  to 
a  more  Parisian  scepticism.  His  earlier  crit- 
icisms were  all  solidly  constructed  and  stood 
four-square.  Renan,  M.  Georges  Ohnet,  and 
M.  Zola  were  never  in  any  doubt  as  to  his  final 
opinion. 

The  later  criticisms  are  more  individual, 
more  "  personal  " — as  the  French  say — more 
impressionist,  than  the  earlier.  M.  Lemaitre  is 
quite  aware  that  the  shield  is  silver  on  one  side 
and  gold  on  the  other,  and  he  is  no  longer  will- 
ing to  break  a  lance  for  either  metal,  whichever 
may  be  nearer  to  him.  He  is  open-minded,  he 
sees  both  sides  at  once,  and  he  sets  down  both 
the  pro  and  the  con,  sometimes  declining  to  ex- 
press his  own  ultimate  opinion,  sometimes  even 
refusing  to  form  any  opinion  at  all.  He  is  fond 
of  setting  up  a  man  of  straw  to  act  as  the  dev- 
il's advocate;  but  though  this  insures  a  full 
hearing  of  the  witnesses  for  the  defence  as  well 
as  for  ^the  prosecution,  it  rarely  prevents   M. 


1 62  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Lemaitre  from  getting  his  saint,  after  all,  when 
he  is  resolute  for  the  beatification.  Now  and 
again  he  seems  indifferent,  and  he  remains  "  on 
the  fence,"  as  we  Yankees  say,  or  rather  on  both 
sides  of  it  at  once.  His  attitude  then  is  that  of 
a  lazy  judge  leaving  the  whole  burden  of  decis- 
ion on  the  jury.  Yet  when  his  opinion  is  clear 
and  simple  he  is  prompt  enough,  as  the  es- 
says on  M.  Daudet's  *  Immortel,'  M.  Zola's 
*  Reve,' Victor  Hugo's  *Toute  la  Lyre,'  in  the 
fourth  series,  show  plainly.  This  is  evidence, 
were  any  needed,  that  behind  the  hesitation  and 
the  apparent  indifference  there  is  a  live  interest 
in  literature,  a  real  love  for  what  is  true,  gen- 
uine, hearty,  and  a  sharp  hatred  for  shams. 

His  hatred  of  shams  is  shown  in  his  swift 
condemnation  of  M.  Georges  Ohnet's  romances, 
perhaps  unduly  ferocious  in  manner,  although 
indisputably  deserved.  M.  Georges  Ohnet  is 
the  most  popular  of  French  novelists ;  his  sto- 
ries sell  by  the  hundred  thousand,  and  he  occu- 
pies the  place  in  France  which  the  late  E.  P. 
Roe  held  in  America,  and  which  Mr.  Rider 
Haggard  holds  now  in  England.  There  had 
been  a  general  silence  in  the  French  press  about 
M.  Ohnet's  novels  ;  no  one  praised  them  highly, 
but  they  pleased  the  public — or,  at  least,  the 
half-educated  and  really  illiterate  mass  of  novel 


M.    JULES    LEMAItRE  1 63 

readers.  M.  Lemaitre  felt  the  revolt  of  a  schol- 
ar of  refined  tastes  and  delicate  instincts  against 
the  overpowering  popularity  of  M.  Ohnet's 
empty  triviality,  and  in  a  memorable  article  he 
"  belled  the  cat "  and  he  "  rang  the  bell."  Never 
was  such  an  execution  since  Macaulay  slew 
Montgomery.  M.  Lemaitre  began  by  saying 
that  he  was  in  the  habit  of  discussing  literary 
subjects,  but  he  hoped  that  he  would  be  par- 
doned if  he  spoke  now  of  the  novels  of  M. 
Georges  Ohnet ;  and  then  he  went  on  to  hold 
up  to  scorn  the  feeble  style  of  M.  Ohnet,  the 
merely  mechanical  structure  of  his  stories,  the 
conventionality  of  his  characters  and  their  falsity 
to  humanity,  the  barren  absurdity  of  his  philos- 
ophy of  life  and  the  baseness  of  his  appeal  to 
the  prejudices  of  the  middle  class,  wherein  he 
sought  for  readers.  In  general,  M.  Lemaitre  is 
keen  of  fence,  and  his  weapon  is  the  smallsword 
of  the  duelling  field  ;  but  to  M.  Ohnet  he  took 
a  single-stick  or  a  quarter-staff,  and  with  this 
he  beat  his  victim  black  and  blue,  breaking 
more  than  one  bone. 

Longfellow  tells  us  that  "a  young  critic  is 
like  a  boy  with  a  gun  ;  he  fires  at  every  living 
thing  he  sees  ;  he  thinks  only  of  his  own  skill, 
not  of  the  pain  he  is  giving."  M.  Lemaitre  was 
a  young  critic  when  he  wrote  this  crushing  as- 


164  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

sault  on  M.  Ohnet.  Since  then  he  has  never 
attempted  to  repeat  the  experience ;  it  is  true 
that  there  is  in  France  to-day  no  other  subject  as 
good  as  M.  Ohnet  for  a  severe  critic  to  try  his 
hand  on.  Of  late  when  M.  Lemaitre  has  had 
to  express  a  hostile  opinion  he  has  been  more 
indirect ;  and  now  he  draws  blood  by  a  dexter- 
ous insinuation  adroitly  thrust  under  his  adver- 
sary's sword  arm.  Ill-disguised  was  his  con- 
tempt for  Albert  Wolff,  a  Parisian  from  Cologne, 
a  writer  of  chroniques  for  the  Figaro — most 
perishable  of  all  articles  de  Paris — one  who  is 
to  journalism  what  M.  Georges  Ohnet  is  to  lit- 
erature. Ill-disguised  is  his  condemnation  of 
the  part  M.  Henri  Rochefort  has  played  in  the 
French  politics  of  the  past  quarter  of  a  century, 
and  bitterly  incisive — corrosive  almost — is  the 
outline  he  etches  of  the  character  of  the  man 
with  the  immitigable  grin,  the  man  whose 
Lanterne  helped  to  light  the  fall  of  the  second 
empire,  the  man  who  has  since  egged  on  every 
revolt,  however  bloody,  however  hopeless,  how- 
ever foolish. 

Of  these  adverse  criticisms  there  are  very  few 
indeed — a  scant  half-dozen,  perhaps — in  the 
threescore  essays  contained  in  volumes  of  *  Les 
Contemporains.'  This  is  as  it  should  be,  for  he 
is  a  very  narrow  critic  indeed  who  deals  more 


M.    JULES   LEMaItRE  1 65 

in  blame  than  in  praise.  For  criticism  to  be 
profitable  and  pregnant,  the  critic  must  needs 
dwell  on  the  works  he  admires.  Merely  neg- 
ative criticism  is  sterile.  The  late  Edmond 
Scherer  said  that  "  the  ideal  of  criticism  was  to 
be  able  to  praise  cordially  and  with  enthusiasm, 
if  need  be,  without  losing  one's  head  or  getting 
blind  to  defects." 

Nothing  is  more  needful  for  a  critic  than  sym- 
pathy with  his  subject.  The  faculty  of  appre- 
ciation, of  hearty  admiration,  of  contagious  en- 
thusiasm even,  is  among  the  best  gifts  of  a  true 
critic ;  and  this  M.  Lemaitre  has  in  abundance. 
He  likes  the  best  and  the  best  only,  but  this  he 
likes  superlatively.  And  he  can  see  the  good 
points  even  of  authors  who  do  not  altogether 
please  him  ;  and  these  he  is  always  ready  to 
laud  in  hearty  fashion. 

"  Readers  like  to  find  themselves  more  severe 
than  the  critic  ;  and  I  let  them  have  this  pleas- 
ure," said  Sainte-Beuve.  M.  Lemaitre  goes  far 
beyond  his  great  predecessor;  he  delights  in 
broad  eulogy  of  those  who  appeal  to  his  delicate 
sense  of  the  exquisite  in  literary  art.  His  en- 
joyment of  "  Pierre  Loti,"  for  example,  of  M. 
Daudet's  '  Nabab,'  of  Renan,  is  so  intense  that  he 
is  swept  off  his  feet  by  the  strong  current  of  ad- 
miration.    But  though  he  lose  his  feet  he  keeps 


1 66  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

his  head,  and  in  his  highest  raptures  he  is  never 
uncritical.  What  M.  Lemaitre  likes  best,  if  not 
always  the  books  best  worth  liking,  are  always 
at  least  books  well  worth  liking;  and  he  likes 
them  for  what  is  best  in  them,  and  never  for 
their  affectations,  their  superfluities,  their  con- 
tortions ;  and  it  is  for  these  often  that  many  a 
critic  pretends  to  worship  a  master.  M.  Le- 
maitre's  taste  is  keen  and  fine  and  sure ;  and  his 
judgment  is  solid. 

Although  M.  Lemaitre  knows  his  classics — 
Greek,  Latin,  and  French — as  becomes  a  Nor- 
maliefiy  he  likes  French  literature  better  than 
Greek  or  Latin  ;  and  he  likes  the  French  liter- 
ature of  the  nineteenth  century  better  than  that 
of  the  eighteenth,  or  even  of  the  seventeenth. 
It  is  his  contemporaries  who  most  interest  him. 
In  his  clear  and  subtle  and  respectful  analysis 
of  the  characteristics  of  his  fellow-critic  M. 
Ferdinand  Bruneti^re,  M.  Lemaitre  confesses 
that  while  he  reads  Bossuet  and  acknowledges 
the  power  of  that  most  eloquent  of  orators,  yet 
the  reading  gives  him  little  pleasure,  "  whereas 
often  on  opening  by  chance  a  book  of  to-day  or 
of  yesterday  "  he  thrills  with  delight ;  and  he 
calls  on  M.  Bruneti^re  to  set  off  one  century 
against  the  other.  "  If,  perhaps,  Corneille,  Ra- 
cine, Bossuet  have  no  equivalents  to-day,  had 


M.   JULES   LEMaJtRE  1 67 

the  great  century  the  equivalent  of  Lamartine, 
of  Victor  Hugo,  of  Musset,  of  Michelet,  of 
George  Sand,  of  Sainte-Beuve,  of  Flaubert,  of 
M.  Renan  ?  And  is  it  my  fault  if  I  would  rath- 
er read  a  chapter  of  M.  Renan  than  a  sermon 
of  Bossuet,  the  *  Nabab  *  than  the  *  Princess  of 
Cleves,*  and  a  certain  comedy  of  Meilhac  and 
Haldvy  even  than  a  comedy  of  Moli^re  ?" 

It  is  this,  I  think,  which  gives  to  M.  Le- 
maitre's  criticism  much  of  its  value— his  intense 
liking  for  the  French  literature  of  to-day,  and 
his  perfect  understanding  of  its  moods  and  of 
its  methods.  He  has  an  extraordinary  dex- 
terity in  plucking  out  the  heart  of  technical 
mysteries.  In  considering  a  little  book  of  say- 
ings he  took  occasion  to  declare  the  theory  of 
maxim-making,  whereby  every  man  may  be  his 
own  La  Rochefoucauld,  and  he  supplied  an 
abundance  of  bright  examples  manufactured 
according  to  his  new  formulas.  In  like  manner 
he  discovered  the  trick  of  the  rhythms  and 
rhymes  of  Theodore  de  Banville,  the  reviver  of 
the  rondeau  and  of  the  ballade,  and  a  past- 
master  of  verbal  jugglery  and  of  acrobatic  verse. 

In  peering  into  the  methods  of  more  impor- 
tant literary  workmen  he  is  equally  keen. 
Take,  for  example,  his  study  of  M.  Zola — per- 
haps the  most  acute  and  the  most  respectful 


1 68  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

analysis  of  M.  Zola's  very  remarkable  powers  to 
be  found  anywhere ;  more  elaborate  than  the 
excellent  essay  written  by  Mr.  Henry  James 
when  *  Nana '  was  published.  M.  Zola  is  a  nov- 
elist with  a  theory  of  his  art  violently  promul- 
gated and  turbulently  reiterated  until  most  peo- 
ple were  ready  to  accept  his  own  word  for  his 
work,  and  to  regard  his  romances  as  examples  of 
the  Naturalism  he  proclaimed.  Now  and  then 
an  adverse  critic  dwelt  on  the  inconsistencies 
between  M.  Zola's  theory  and  his  practice,  and 
M.  Zola  himself  bemoaned  the  occasional  sur- 
vivals of  the  Romanticist  spirit  he  detected  in 
himself.  M.  Lemaitre  began  by  thrusting  this 
aside,  and  by  painting  M.  Zola  in  his  true  col- 
ors with  a  bold  sweep  of  the  brush.  "M. 
Zola,"  he  declared,  "is  not  a  critic,  and  he  is 
not  a  Naturalistic  novelist  in  the  meaning  he 
himself  gives  to  the  term.  But  M.  Zola  is  an 
epic  poet  and  a  pessimistic  poet.  .  .  .  By 
poet  I  mean  a  writer  who  in  virtue  of  an  idea 
.  .  .  notably  transforms  reality,  and  having 
so  transformed  it  gives  it  life."  M.  Lemaitre 
then  shows  us  the  simple  but  powerful  mechan- 
ism of  M.  Zola's  art — how  he  takes  a  theme  and 
sets  it  before  the  reader  with  broad  strokes 
and  with  typical  characters  boldly  differentiated 
and  reduced  almost  to  their  elements,  but  none 


M.    JULES    LEMAtXRE  1 69 

the  less  alive.  Space  fails  here  to  show  how  M. 
Lemaitre  works  out  most  convincingly  the  sub- 
stantial identity  of  M.  Zola's  massive  method 
with  that  of  the  epic  poet,  and  how  he  discov- 
ers in  every  one  of  M.  Zola's  later  fictions  a 
Beast,  a  huge  symbol  of  the  theme  which  that 
story  sets  forth,  and  a  Chorus  which  comments 
upon  the  events  and  brings  them  nearer  to  the 
reader. 

The  essay  may  be  recommended  to  all  who 
have  a  taste  for  criticism ;  I  know  nothing  at 
once  more  acute,  more  original,  or  truer.  It 
may  be  recommended  especially  to  those  who 
would  like  to  know  what  manner  of  writer  M. 
Zola  is,  and  who  yet  shrink  from  the  reading  of 
his  novels,  often  drawn  out  and  wearisome,  and 
nearly  always  foul  and  repulsive.  It  is  M. 
Zola's  misfortune — and  it  is  indubitably  his 
own  fault — that  he  is  judged  by  hearsay  often, 
and  that  his  books  are  taken  as  the  types  of 
filthy  fiction.  Perhaps  he  is  more  frequently 
condemned  than  read — although  sometimes  the 
British  abuse  of  his  books  has  struck  me  as  the 
reaction  of  guilty  enjoyment.  Occasion  serves 
to  say  in  parentheses  here  that  while  M.  Zola's 
forcible  and  effective  novels  are  painful  often, 
while  they  are  dirty  frequently  and  indefensi- 
bly, they  are  not  immoral.     It  is  rather  in  Oc- 


170  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

tave  Feuillet's  rose-colored  novels  or  in  M. 
Georges  Ohnet's  gilt-edged  fictions  that  we 
may  seek  insidious  immorality. 

M.  Lemaitre  indicates  the  misplaced  dirt  in 
M.  Zola's  novels,  and  obviously  enough  is  him- 
self a  man  of  clean  mind ;  but  perhaps  he  lacks 
the  inherent  sternness  of  morality  which  in  a 
man  of  Anglo-Saxon  stock  would  go  with  an 
upright  character  like  his.  He  has  a  respect- 
ful regard  for  the  Don  Juan  of  Moliere  and  of 
Mozart,  of  Byron  and  of  Musset ;  and  he  has 
a  kindly  tolerance  for  the  disciples  of  Don  Juan 
who  infest  French  literature. 

M.  Lemaitre's  dramatic  criticisms,  his  *  Im- 
pressions de  Theatre '  are  quite  as  original  as 
his  more  solid  literary  portraits,  quite  as  fresh, 
quite  as  individual,  quite  as  amusing.  He 
lacks  the  profound  knowledge  of  the  con- 
ditions of  dramatic  art,  the  extraordinary  in- 
sight into  the  necessary  conventions  upon 
which  it  is  based,  the  thorough  acquaintance 
with  the  history  of  the  theatre  in  France, 
which  have  given  to  the  foremost  theatrical 
critic  of  our  time,  M.  Francisque  Sarcey,  his 
unexampled  authority.  But  he  looks  at  the 
stage  always  through  his  own  eyes,  never 
through  the  opera-glass  of  his  neighbor  or  the 
spectacles  of  tradition.     He  is  fond  of  the  the- 


M.    JULES   LEMAtTRE  17I 

atre,  and  yet  he  readily  goes  outside  of  its  walls, 
and  considers  not  merely  the  technic  of  the 
dramatist  but  also  the  ethics.  Like  most  well- 
equipped  and  keen-witted  critics,  his  criticism 
willingly  broadens  its  vision  to  consider  life  as 
well  as  literature.  Of  the  conventionalities 
and  the  concessions  to  chance  which  the  writer 
of  comedy  avails  himself  freely,  M.  Lemaitre 
is  tolerant,  and  wisely ;  but  he  is  intolerant  and 
implacable  toward  the  false  psychology  and  the 
defective  ethics  of  the  mere  playwright  who 
twists  characters  and  misrepresents  humanity  to 
gain  an  effect. 

The  critic  of  the  D^bats  is  not  content  with 
describing  the  dramas  of  the  leading  theatres  of 
Paris  ;  he  has  a  Thackerayan  fondness  for  spec- 
tacles of  all  kinds,  for  the  ballet,  for  the  circus 
and  the  pantomime,  for  side-shows,  for  freaks 
of  every  degree.  In  all  these  he  finds  unfailing 
amusement  and  an  unflagging  variety  of  im- 
pressions. He  is  always  alert,  lively,  gay  ;  and 
though  he  travels  far  afield,  he  is  never  at  his 
wits*  end.  In  his  dramatic  criticisms  M.  Le- 
maitre appears  to  me  as  a  serious  student  of 
literature  and  of  life,  playing  the  part  of  a  Pa- 
risian— and  it  is  a  most  excellent  impersona- 
tion. 

Of  M.  Lemaitre's  poems,  there  is  no  need  to 


172  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

say  anything  ;  they  are  the  verses  of  a  very 
clever  man,  no  doubt,  but  not  those  of  a  born 
poet.  They  shine  with  the  reflected  light  of 
his  work  in  prose.  Gray  thought  "  even  a  bad 
verse  as  good  a  thing  or  better  than  the  best 
observation  that  ever  was  made  upon  it ;  "  but 
even  fairly  good  verse  is  not  as  good  a  thing 
as  the  best  observation  that  ever  was  made  on 
the  best  verse.  It  is  to  the  prose  and  not  to 
the  verse  of  Lessing  and  of  Sainte-Beuve  that 
we  turn,  again  and  again. 

Of  M.  Lemaitre's  stories  there  is  no  need  to 
say  much :  they  are  the  tales  of  a  very  clever 
man,  of  course,  but  not  those  of  a  born  teller  of 
tales.  They  lack  a  something  vague  and  inde- 
finable— a  flavor,  a  perfume,  an  aroma  of  vital- 
ity ;  it  is  as  though  they  were  a  manufacture, 
rather,  and  not  a  growth.  They  are  not  inev- 
itable enough.  They  are  naif  without  being 
quite  convincing.  They  have  simplicity  of  mo- 
tive, harmony  of  construction,  sharpness  of  out- 
line, touches  of  melancholy  and  pathos,  unfail- 
ing ingenuity  and  wit — and  yet — and  yet —  Of 
the  stories  contained  in  the  beautifully  illus- 
trated volume  called  *  Dix  Contes '  only  three  or 
four  are  modern,  and  even  these  seem  to  have  a 
hint  of  allegory  as  though  there  were  perhaps  a 
concealed  moral  somewhere.     The  rest  are  tales 


M.    JULES    LEMAfTRE  1 73 

of  once-upon-a-time,  in  Arabia,  in  Greece,  in 
Rome,  as  dissimilar  as  possible  from  the  contes 
of  M.  Daudet  or  of  Maupassant,  of  M.  Copp^e 
or  of  M.  Hal^vy,  and  with  a  certain  likeness  to 
the  *  Contes  Philosophiques  '  of  Voltaire.  To 
say  this  is  to  suggest  that  they  are  rather  fables, 
apologues,  allegories,  than  short-stories. 

Of  M.  Lemaitre's  play,  *  Revoltee,'  there  is  no 
need  to  say  more ;  it  is  the  comedy  of  a  very 
clever  man  indeed,  but  not  that  of  a  born  play- 
wright. When  acted  at  the  Odeon  in  1889  it 
did  not  fail,  but  it  did  not  prove  a  powerful  at- 
traction. When  published — and  to  the  delight 
of  all  who  are  fond  of  the  drama  French  plays 
are  still  published  as  English  comedies  were 
once — it  impressed  the  expert  as  likely  to  read 
better  than  it  acted.  There  was  abundance  of 
wit,  for  example,  but  it  was  rather  the  wit  of 
M.  Jules  Lemaitre  than  of  his  characters,  and 
it  was  rather  the  wit  of  the  study  than  of  the 
stage.  Yet  *  Revoltee  '  is  an  honorable  attempt, 
and  highly  mteresting  to  all  who  are  interested 
in  M.  Lemaitre. 

To  sum  up  my  opinion  of  these  tentative  en- 
deavors in  other  departments  of  literature,  M. 
Lemaitre  is  a  very  clever  man,  whose  cleverness 
does  not  lead  him  naturally  and  irresistibly  to 
poetry  or   to   story-telling  or    to   playwriting. 


174  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

What  it  does  lead  him  to  is  criticism — criticism 
of  literature  primarily,  because  he  loves  letters, 
but  criticism  also  of  life  at  large,  of  man  and  his 
manners,  his  motives,  his  relation  to  the  world 
and  to  the  universe.  He  has  not  only  the  fac- 
ulty of  straight  thinking,  but  also  that  of  plain 
speaking.  He  is  bold  and  direct  in  his  discus- 
sion of  social  problems,  applying  to  their  solution 
an  unusual  common-sense,  and  developing  also 
an  unusual  understanding  of  the  causes  of  ap- 
parent anomalies.  I  do  not  know  anywhere  a 
more  acute  statement  of  the  relative  duty  of 
faithfulness  on  the  part  of  husband  and  wife 
than  is  to  be  found  in  his  criticism  of  the  *  Fran- 
cillon '  of  M.  Dumas  Jils.  And  that  this  state- 
ment should  be  found  in  a  theatrical  criticism  is 
characteristic  of  M.  Lemaitre's  attitude ;  as  his 
vision  broadens  and  his  interest  in  life  deepens, 
a  play  or  a  novel  is  to  him  chiefly  valuable  as 
the  theme  and  text  of  a  social  inquiry.  Liter- 
ature alone  no  longer  satisfies. 

(1900)-  .  4 


TWO  SCOTSMEN  OF  LETTERS 


TWO  SCOTSMEN  OF  LETTERS 

I.-MR.  ANDREW  LANG 

The  most  lifelike  photograph  of  a  friend  is 
no  more  than  a  reminder  of  what  we  have 
seen  for  ourselves,  since  the  camera  has  neither 
insight  nor  imagination ;  a  portrait  by  a  true 
artist  may  bring  out  qualities  but  doubtfully 
glimpsed  before,  or  it  may  even  reveal  depths 
of  character  hitherto  unsuspected.  In  one  of 
the  London  exhibitions  during  the  season  of 
1885,  amidst  many  a  "  portrait  of  a  gentleman," 
there  was  at  least  one  portrait  of  a  man  — 
nervous,  significant,  vital.  At  a  glance  it  was 
obvious  that  the  man  here  depicted  was  a 
gentleman  and  a  scholar,  although  the  picture 
had  none  of  the  prim  propriety  of  the  ordinary 
academic  portrait.  There  was  an  air  of  dis- 
tinction about  the  sitter,  twisted  around  in 
his  chair,  with  his  frankly  humorous  gaze.  The 
casual  stranger  whose  eye  might  fall  on  the 
painting  could  not  but  feel  that  the  restless 


178  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

attitude  was  inevitably  characteristic,  and  he 
could  not  but  confess  the  charm  of  a  most 
interesting  personality.  And,  indeed,  Mr. 
Richmond's  picture  of  Mr.  Andrew  Lang 
seems  to  me  one  of  the  most  successful  of 
modern  portraits. 

Perhaps  the  first  effect  it  makes  on  the  be- 
holder is  to  suggest  the  extreme  cleverness 
of  its  subject — an  effect  which  may  do  an  in- 
justice to  Mr.  Lang,  for  cleverness  is  best  as 
an  extra,  as  the  superfluity  of  him  who  has 
some  quality  other  and  better.  Moli^re  was 
not  clever,  and  M.  Sardou  is  clever  beyond 
belief.  When  cleverness  is  all  a  man's  having, 
though  he  make  a  brave  show  for  a  while, 
he  is  poor  indeed.  Cleverness  Mr.  Lang  has, 
and  a  plethora  of  it;  but  he  has  also  a  richer 
endowment.  He  may  be  called  the  Admira- 
ble Crichton  of  modern  letters  ;  and  he  is  a 
graduate  of  St.  Andrew's,  that  ancient  Scottish 
university  where  the  original  Crichton  was 
once  a  student  three  centuries  earlier.  Thence 
he  went  to  Oxford,  where  there  lingered 
memories  of  Landor  and  Shelley,  where  he 
took  the  Newdigate  prize  for  poetry,  and 
where  in  due  season  he  was  elected  a  Fellow 
of  Merton,  the  college  of  Anthony  Wood. 
Herein,  I  think,  we  may  grasp  the  clew  to  Mr. 


MR.  ANDREW   LANG  I'jg 

Lang's  character,  and  to  his  career:  he  is  a 
Scotsman  who  has  been  tinctured  by  Oxford, 
but  who  still  grips  his  stony  native  land  with 
many  a  clinging  radicle. 

Mr.  Andrew  Lang  and  the  late  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  were  for  a  while  the  two  Scottish 
chiefs  of  literature.  Both  lived  out  of  Scotland, 
yet  both  were  loyal  to  the  land  of  their  birth, 
and  loved  it  with  all  the  ardor  of  a  good  son's 
love.  Neither  was  in  robust  health,  but  there 
was  no  taint  of  invalidism  in  the  writings  of 
either,  no  hint  of  morbid  complaint  or  of  un- 
wholesome self-compassion.  Both  were  reso- 
lutely optimistic,  as  becomes  Scotchmen.  Both 
were  critics,  with  sharp  eyes  for  valuing,  and 
with  a  faculty  of  enthusiastic  and  appetizing 
enjoyment  of  what  is  best.  They  had  both 
attempted  fiction,  and  both  belong  to  the  ro- 
mantic school.  In  differing  degrees  each  was 
a  poet,  and  each  was  master  of  a  prose  than 
which  no  better  is  written  in  our  language 
nowadays.  Mr.  Lang's  style  has  not  the  tor- 
tured felicity  of  Stevenson's;  its  happiness 
is  easier  and  less  wilful.  The  author  of  *  Let- 
ters to  Dead  Authors '  is  not  an  artificer  of 
cunning  phrase  like  the  author  of  *  Memories 
and  Portraits';  his  style  is  not  hand-made  nor 
the  result  of  taking  thought ;   it  grows  more 


l8o  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

of  its  own  accord.  The  style  of  each  is  trans- 
parent, but  while  Stevenson's  is  as  hard  as 
crystal,  Mr.  Lang's  is  fluid  like  water  ;  it  flows, 
and  sometimes  it  sings  as  it  flows,  like  the 
beautiful  brooks  he  longs  to  linger  beside, 
changing  with  the  sky  and  the  rocks  and  the 
trees,  but  always  limpid  and  delightful. 

American  readers,  annoyed  at  the  sloven- 
liness of  most  modern  British  essayists,  are 
struck  by  the  transparent  clearness  of  Mr. 
Lang's  style ;  for  though  he  was  born  north 
of  the  Tweed  his  pages  are  spoiled  by  no  Scot- 
ticisms, and  though  he  dwells  by  the  banks  of 
the  Thames  they  are  disfigured  by  no  Briti- 
cisms. They  are  free  from  the  doubtful  Eng- 
lish which  has  the  "  largest  circulation  in  the 
world."  A  constant  perusal  of  the  fine  prose 
of  the  great  Frenchmen  whom  Mr.  Lang  ad- 
mires and  a  devoted  study  of  the  great  Greeks 
whom  he  loves  may  have  helped  to  give  his 
pages  their  indisputable  ease. 

In  his  pellucid  prose,  as  in  his  intellectual 
alertness  and  in  his  lightness  of  touch,  Mr. 
Lang  is  rather  French  than  English.  He  is  a 
nephew  of  Voltaire  and  a  cousin  of  M.  Jules 
Lemaitre.  As  we  read  his  graceful  and  ner- 
vous sentences  sometimes  our  ear  catches  an 
echo  of  Thackeray's  cadences ;  and  it  was  in 


MR.  ANDREW   LANG  l8l 

France  that  Thackeray  served  his  apprentice- 
ship to  the  trade  of  author.  Sometimes  our 
eye  rejoices  in  the  play  of  a  humor  always 
lambent  and  often  Lamb-like;  and  it  is  per- 
haps from  Charles  Lamb  that  Mr.  Lang  has 
got  the  knack  of  the  quotation  held  in  solu- 
tion. Like  Dryden  and  Burke  and  Bagehot, 
three  masters  of  English  prose,  Mr.  Lang 
quotes  abundantly  and  from  a  full  memory, 
and  not  always  exactly.  "Verify  your  quo- 
tations "  is  not  a  warning  that  he  has  taken 
to  heart.  The  books  from  which  he  can  draw 
illustrations  at  will  are  numberless,  and  they 
are  to  be  found  in  every  department  of  the 
library.  In  Greek  literature,  and  in  French 
as  well  as  in  English,  he  has  the  minute  thor- 
oughness of  the  scholar;  but  his  main  read- 
ing seems  to  have  been  afield,  as  happens 
to  every  man  who  loves  books,  and  who  likes 
to  browse  among  them  without  let  or  hinder- 
ance. 

The  equipment  of  a  critic  Mr.  Lang  has,  and 
the  insight,  and  also  the  sympathy,  without 
which  the  two  other  needful  qualities  lose  half 
their  value.  There  are  limits  to  his  sympathy, 
and  he  tells  us  that  he  does  "  not  care  for  Mr. 
Gibbon  except  in  his  autobiography,  nor  for  the 
elegant  plays  of  M.  Racine,  nor  very  much  for 


1 82  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Mr.  William  Wordsworth,  though  his  genius  is 
undeniable";  but  the  range  of  his  knowledge 
and  of  his  understanding  seems  to  me  as  wide 
as  that  of  any  other  contemporary  British 
critic.  He  is  unfailing  in  affection  for  Homer, 
Herodotus,  Theocritus,  and  Lucian,  for  Vergil 
and  Horace,  for  Rabelais,  Moliere,  and  Dumas, 
for  Shakespeare,  Fielding,  Miss  Austen,  and 
Thackeray,  for  Scott  and  Burns.  He  delights 
in  the  skittish  writings  of  the  lively  lady  who 
calls  herself  "  Gyp,"  while  for  the  psychologic 
subtleties  of  M.  Paul  Bourget  he  cares  as  lit- 
tle as  does  "  Gyp  "  herself.  He  was  prompt 
in  praise  of  the  author  of  *  King  Solomon's 
Mines';  in  fact,  Mr.  Haggard's  tales  of  battle, 
murder,  and  sudden  death  have  found  no 
warmer  eulogist  than  the  author  of  *  Ballades 
in  Blue  China.' 

Longfellow  declared  that  "many  readers 
judge  of  the  power  of  a  book  by  the  shock  it 
gives  their  feelings,  as  some  savage  tribes  de- 
termine the  power  of  muskets  by  their  recoil ; 
that  being  considered  the  best  which  fairly 
prostrates  the  purchaser."  Mr.  Lang's  taste  is 
too  refined  for  this  saying  to  be  justly  appli- 
cable to  him ;  but  he  does  not  think  the  worse 
of  a  book  because  it  tells  a  tale  of  daring-do. 
He  is  eager  for  a  story  of 


MR.  ANDREW    LANG  1 83 

battles,  sieges,  fortunes 

Of  moving  accidents  by  flood  and  field, 
Of   hair  -  breadth   'scapes    i'    the    imminent  deadly 
breach. 

He  is  quick  to  give  a  cordial  greeting  to  a 
traveller's  history  of  "  antres  vast  and  deserts 
idle,"  of  "  Anthropophagi,  and  men  whose  heads 
do  grow  beneath  their  shoulders."  In  other 
words,  Mr.  Lang  is  a  romanticist  to  the  bitter 
end.  Broad  as  his  sympathy  is,  it  is  not 
broad  enough  to  comprehend  realism.  He  is 
restive  when  realism  is  lauded.  Unconscious- 
ly, no  doubt, he  resents  it  a  little;  and  he  does 
not  quite  understand  it.  Mr.  Lang  can  enjoy 
Rabelais,  and  praise  him  for  the  qualities  which 
make  him  great  in  spite  of  his  wilful  foulness; 
but  in  M.  Zola  Mr.  Lang  sees  little  to  com- 
mend. Quite  the  most  perfunctory  essay  of 
Mr.  Lang's  that  I  ever  read  was  one  on  the 
author  of  *  L'Assommoir,'  which  did  but  scant 
justice  to  the  puissant  laborer  who  toiled  un- 
ceasingly on  the  massive  edifice  of  the  *  Rou- 
gon-Macquart '  series,  as  mightily  planned  and 
solid  in  structure  as  a  medieval  cathedral,  and, 
like  it,  disfigured  and  defiled  by  needless  and 
frequent  indecencies.  Tolerant  towards  most 
literary  developments,  Mr.  Lang  is  a  little  in- 
tolerant towards  the  analysts.     Amiel  delights 


184  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

him  not,  nor  Marie  Bashkirtseff  either ;  and  it 
irks  him  to  hear  Ibsen  praised,  or  Tolstoi, 
though  the  pitiful  figure  of  Anna  Kar^nina 
lingers  in  his  memory.  And  as  for  Mr.  How- 
ells,  it  is  hard  to  say  whether  it  is  as  novelist 
or  critic  that  he  irritates  Mr.  Lang  more.  Mr. 
Howells  once  spoke  of  the  critical  essaylets 
which  issued  monthly  from  the  *  Editor's 
Study '  as  "  arrows  shot  into  the  air  in  the 
hope  that  they  will  come  down  somewhere  and 
hurt  somebody."  Enough  of  them  have  hit 
Mr.  Lang  to  make  him  look  like  St.  Sebastian, 
if  only  he  had  not  plucked  them  out  swiftly, 
one  by  one,  and  sent  them  hurtling  back  across 
the  Atlantic.  Fortunately,  the  injuries  were 
not  fatal  on  either  side  of  the  water,  and  there 
was  no  poison  on  the  tips  of  the  weapons  to 
rankle  in  the  wounds.  Sensitive  as  most  Brit- 
ish writers  are  to  the  darts  of  transatlantic 
criticism,  it  has  seemed  to  me  sometimes  that 
Mr.  Lang  is  even  tenderer  of  skin  than  are 
most  of  his  fellow-sufferers. 

The  ocean  that  surges  between  Mr.  Howells 
and  Mr.  Lang  is  unfordable,  and  there  is  no  hope 
of  a  bridge.  There  is  no  common  standing- 
ground  anywhere  for  those  who  hold  fiction  to 
be  primarily  an  amusement  and  those  who  be- 
lieve that  it  ought  to  be  chiefly  a  criticism  of 


MR.  ANDREW   LANG  185 

life.  The  romanticist  considers  fiction  as  an  art, 
and  as  an  art  only,  whilst  the  extreme  realist 
is  inclined  to  look  on  it  almost  as  a  branch 
of  science.  Kindly  as  Mr.  Lang  may  be  in  his 
reception  of  a  realistic  book,  now  and  then,  he 
stands  firmly  on  the  platform  of  the  extreme 
romanticists.  "  Find  forgetfulness  of  trouble, 
and  taste  the  anodyne  of  dreams — that  is  what 
we  desire  "  of  a  novel,  he  declares  in  his  cordial 
essay  on  Dumas.  And  in  another  paper  he 
calls  again  for  a  potion  against  insomnia : 

Pour  out  the  nepenthe,  in  short,  and  I  shall  not 
ask  if  the  cup  be  gold-chased  by  Mr.  Stevenson,  or  a 
buffalo-J^rn  beaker  brought  by  Mr.  Haggard  from 
Kakuana-land — the  Baron  of  Bradwardine's  Bear,  or 
'The  Cup  of  Hercules'  of  TheophileGautier, or  mere- 
ly a  common  cafe  wineglass  of  M.  Fortune  du  Bois- 
gobey's  or  M.  Xavier  de  Montepin's.  If  only  the 
nepenthe  be  foaming  there — the  delightful  draught  of 
dear  forgetfulness — the  outside  of  the  cup  may  take 
care  of  itself ;  or,  to  drop  metaphor,  I  shall  not  look 
too  closely  at  an  author's  manner  and  style,  while  he 
entertains  me  in  the  dominion  of  dreams. 

Here  Mr.  Lang  is  in  accord  with  M^rimee, 
who  wrote  in  1865  that  "there  is  at  present 
but  one  man  of  genius:  it  is  Ponson  du  Ter- 
rail  .  .  .  No  one  handles  crime  as  he  does, 
nor  assassination.   J'en  fais  mes  ddices''   But 


1 86  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

M^rimee's  humorous  exaggeration  is  not  in 
accord  with  his  own  practice ;  however  abun- 
dant in  imaginative  vigor  his  stories  might 
be,  nothing  could  be  more  rigorously  realistic 
in  treatment.  Mr.  Lang  seems  to  me  happiest 
as  a  story-teller  when  his  practice  departs  from 
his  theory.  His  longest  story,  the  *  Mark  of 
Cain,'  is  as  who  should  say  a  tale  by  M.  Xavier 
de  Mont^pin,  but  by  a  Montepin  who  was  a 
Scotsman,  and  had  been  to  Oxford,  and  did 
not  take  himself  quite  seriously.  Now,  for  a 
romanticist  not  to  take  himself  seriously  is  to 
give  up  the  fight  before  the  battle  is  joined. 
Mr.  Lang  has  balladed  the  praises  of  "  Miss 
Braddon  and  Gaboriau,"  and  he  may  be  sure 
that  these  masters  of  sensation  believed  in 
themselves,  else  would  they  never  have  held 
thousands  breathless.  If  an  author  once  lets 
his  readers  suspect  that  he  is  only  ''making 
believe,"  instantly  he  loses  his  grip  on  their 
attention,  and  may  as  well  put  away  the  pup- 
pets, since  few  spectators  will  care  to  wait  till 
the  fall  of  the  curtain. 

The  one  fault  that  Mr.  James  found  with 
Trollope — that  "  he  took  a  suicidal  satisfaction 
in  reminding  the  reader  that  the  story  he  was 
telling  was  only,  after  all,  a  make  -  believe  " — 
Mr.  Lang  never  commits  of  malice  prepense ; 


MR.  ANDREW    LANG  1 87 

but  though  he  does  not  confess  this  unpar- 
donable sin  in  so  many  words,  yet  his  tone, 
his  manner,  his  confidential  approach,  make 
the  confession  for  him,  and  readers  find  them- 
selves glancing  up  from  the  printed  page  to 
to  see  if  the  author  has  not  his  tongue  in  his 
cheek  or  is  not  laughing  in  his  sleeve.  And 
the  crime  is  the  more  heinous  in  story-tell- 
ing according  to  the  romantic  tradition  than 
in  fiction  of  the  realistic  school.  Mr.  James 
reminds  us  that  "  there  are  two  kinds  of  taste 
in  the  appreciation  of  imaginative  literature 
—  the  taste  for  emotions  of  surprise,  and 
the  taste  for  emotions  of  recognition."  It  is 
the  latter  that  *  Barchester  Towers  *  gratifies, 
and  it  is  to  the  former  that  the  '  Mark  of 
Cain '  appeals ;  and  the  taste  for  the  emotions 
of  surprise  is  not  satisfied  if  it  suspects  the 
writer  of  treating  tragic  moments  with  levity, 
or  even  of  being  capable  of  such  treatment. 
But  perhaps  the  real  reason  why  a  public  that 
accepted  the  tawdry  *  Called  Back*  did  not 
take  kindly  to  the  *  Mark  of  Cain  *  is  that  the 
latter  story  was  too  clever  by  half — a  thing 
resented  by  most  of  those  who  share  Mr. 
Lang's  taste  for  the  emotions  of  surprise. 

Perhaps  the  same  criticism  applies  to  some 
of   the  stories   in   the    collection    called   '  In 


1 88  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

the  Wrong  Paradise ' — to  the  Poe-like  tale  of 
*A  Cheap  Negro,'  for  example.  But  others 
of  the  stories  in  this  volume,  especially  the 
uncanny  tales  of  spooks  and  of  medicine- 
men, are  most  delicious  fooling — and  fooling 
founded  on  the  impregnable  rock  of  modern 
science.  What  could  be  better  in  its  way 
than  the  *  Great  Gladstone  Myth  ?*  —  wherein 
the  grand  old  man  is  resolved  into  his  ele- 
ments in  the  fashion  familiar  to  students  of 
sun -myths.  Equally  amusing,  and  quite  as 
pregnant  in  suggestion,  is  the  description  of 
the  poor  souls  who  found  themselves  each 
*  In  the  Wrong  Paradise  ' — the  scalped  Scotch- 
man dwelling  with  the  Apaches  in  their  happy 
hunting-grounds,  and  the  wretched  cockney 
esthete  desperately  out  of  place  in  the  For- 
tunate Islands  of  the  Greeks.  And  in  the 
volume  of  pleasant  papers  on  '  Books  and 
Bookmen '  there  is  an  eery  tale  of  painful 
and  humorous  misadventure  in  *  A  Bookman's 
Purgatory.*  Akin  to  these  in  method,  and 
even  superior  to  them  in  charm,  is  the  story 
of  *  Prince  Prigio,'  which  of  all  Mr.  Lang's  fic- 
tions I  like  best,  unhesitatingly  proclaiming 
it  the  most  delightful  of  modern  fairy-tales 
since  the  'Rose  and  the  Ring';  and  if  any 
one  should  tell  me  that  he  found  no  fun  in 


MR.  ANDREW   LANG  1 89 

the  awful  combat  between  the  Firedrake  and 
the  Remora,  I  should  make  answer  that  such 
an  one,  waking  or  sleeping,  does  not  deserve 
ever  to  receive  as  a  gift,  or  even  as  a  loan, 
the  seven-leagued  boots,  the  cap  of  darkness, 
or  the  purse  of  Fortunatus — all  properties  of 
fair>'-lore  with  which  Prince  Prigio  was  duly 
accoutred. 

From  fairy -land  to  the  doubtful  region  of 
folk-lore  is  no  seven -leagued  stride,  and  Mr. 
Lang  is  master  in  both  territories.  He  stands 
ready  to  trace  the  kinship  of  Barbarossa  and 
Barbe-bleue,  and  to  insist  that  neither  is  a 
child  of  the  sun.  In  defence  of  his  theories 
Mr.  Lang  is  armed  to  give  battle  to  Profess- 
or Max  Muller  and  his  men;  and  they  find 
him  a  redoubtable  opponent,  in  no  danger  of 
putting  off  the  heavy  armor  of  scholarship 
because  he  has  not  proved  it,  and  never  with- 
out a  smooth  stone  in  his  scrip  to  cast  full  at 
the  forehead  of  his  adversary.  Lowell  has 
protested  against  that  zeal  which  seeks  to  ex- 
plain away  every  myth  as  a  personification  of 
the  dawn  and  the  day.  "  There's  not  a  sliver 
jeft  of  Odin,"  he  declared: 

Or  else  the  core  his  name  enveloped 
Was  from  a  solar  myth  developed 


190  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

Which,  hunted  to  its  primal  shoot, 
Takes  refuge  in  a  Sanskrit  root, 
Thereby  to  instant  death  explaining 
The  little  poetry  remaining. 
Try  it  with  Zeus,  't  is  just  the  same ; 
The  thing  evades,  we  hug  a  name; 
Nay,  scarcely  that — perhaps  a  vapor 
Born  of  some  atmospheric  caper. 

Against  the  philologic  school  of  mytholo- 
gists  of  whom  Professor  Max  Miiller  is  the 
chief,  Mr.  Lang  has  led  a  revolt  in  behalf  of  an 
anthropological  explanation  of  those  habits, 
customs,  beliefs,  and  legends  for  which  the  up- 
holders of  the  sun-myth  theory  provided  an 
etymological  interpretation.  Mr.  Lecky  tells 
us  that  invariably  with  increased  education  the 
belief  in  fairies  passes  away,  and  "  from  the 
uniformity  of  this  decline,  we  infer  that  fairy- 
tales are  the  normal  product  of  a  certain  con- 
dition of  the  imagination  ;  and  this  position  is 
raised  to  a  moral  certainty  when  we  find  that 
the  decline  of  fairy-tales  is  but  one  of  a  long 
series  of  similar  transformations."  Inspired 
by  McLennan  and  Professor  Tylor,  and  fol- 
lowing Fontenelle,  Mr.  Lang  has  given  battle 
to  those  who  maintain  that  the  descriptions  of 
the  elemental  processes  of  nature  developed 
into  myths,  and  who  accept  a  personification 


MR.  ANDREW   LANG  IQI 

of  fire,  storm,  cloud,  or  lightning  as  the  origin 
of  Apollo  and  his  chariot,  Thor  and  his  ham- 
mer, Cinderella  and  her  slipper,  and  B'rer  Rab- 
bit and  the  tar-baby. 

In  the  stead  of  the  arbitrary  interpretations 
of  the  philologists,  wherein  scarcely  any  two 
of  them  are  agreed,  Mr.  Lang  proffers  an  ex- 
planation derived  from  a  study  of  the  history 
of  man  and  founded  on  the  methods  of  com- 
parative anthropology.  He  turns  to  account 
the  evolution  of  humanity  from  savagery  to 
civilization,  and  he  examines  the  irrational 
beliefs  and  absurd  customs  which  survived  in 
Greece  even  in  the  days  of  Pericles  by  the  aid 
of  a  study  of  the  beliefs  and  customs  of  sav- 
age tribes  still  in  the  condition  in  which  the 
ancient  Greeks  had  once  been.  Thus  he  is 
ready  to  see  in  the  snake-dance  of  the  Moquis 
of  Arizona  a  possible  help  to  the  right  un- 
derstanding of  a  similar  ceremony  described 
by  Demosthenes.  He  seeks  to  show  that  in 
savagery  we  have  "  an  historical  condition  of 
the  human  intellect  to  which  the  element  in 
myths,  regarded  by  us  as  irrational,"  seems 
rational  enough.  Further,  he  urges  that  as 
savagery  is  a  stage  through  which  all  civilized 
races  have  passed,  the  universality  of  the 
mythopoeic  mental  condition  will  explain  not 


'92  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

only  the  origin,  but  also  the  diffusion  through- 
out the  world,  of  myths  strangely  alike  one  to 
another. 

That  this  ethnological  hypothesis  has  gained 
general  acceptance,  and  placed  the  philologic 
theory  on  the  defensive,  is  due  almost  alto- 
gether to  the  untiring  advocacy  of  Mr.  Lang. 
His  views  have  been  presented  modestly  but 
firmly  and  incessantly.  He  has  prepared  the 
case  himself,  examined  the  witnesses,  and 
summed  up  for  the  plaintiff.  And  he  is  an 
awkward  antagonist,  quick-witted  and  keen- 
sighted,  and  heavy-laden  with  the  results  of 
original  anthropological  investigation.  He  has 
scholarship  in  the  old  sense  of  the  word  ;  and 
to  this  he  adds  the  advantage  of  a  memory 
which  retains  every  pertinent  fact  accumu- 
lated during  omnivorous  reading  over  a  mar- 
vellously wide  range  of  subjects.  Most  dis- 
interested scholars  have  now  accepted  either 
as  a  whole  or  in  part  the  theory  Mr.  Lang  has 
set  forth. 

Of  the  scholarship  which  forms  the  solid 
basis  for  Mr.  Lang's  scientific  inquiry  he  has 
given  abundant  evidence  in  his  nervous  prose 
translations  of  the  '  Odyssey  *  and  the  '  Iliad ' 
done  in  partnership  with  friends,  in  his  refined 
rendering  of  the  *  Idyls  *  of  Theocritus,  and 


MR.  ANDREW  LANG  1 93 

in  his  fresh  and  fragrant  version  of  that  other 
idyl,  'Aucassin  and  Nicolette.*  His  transla- 
tions reveal  an  unusual  union  of  scholarly  ex- 
actness with  idiomatic  vigor ;  they  are  grace- 
ful— almost  the  rarest  quality  of  a  translation 
— and  they  are  unfailingly  poetic.  Perhaps 
an  enforced  quaintness,  and  an  occasional 
insistence  on  an  archaic  word,  seem  almost 
like  affectation,  but  this  may  be  forgiven  in 
the  charm  and  the  felicity  of  the  rendering  as 
a  whole.  The  secret  of  this  charm  is  to  be 
found,  I  think,  in  Mr.  Lang's  attitude  towards 
the  authors  he  translates.  To  him  Homer, 
and  Theocritus,  and  the  old  man  who  sang 
of  *  Aucassin  and  Nicolette,*  are  still  living, 
and  their  works  are  alive.  Scholar  as  he  is, 
his  interest  is  never  grammatical  or  philo- 
logical, but  always  literary  and  human.  He 
never  regards  these  writings  as  verse  to  scan, 
or  as  prose  to  parse,  but  poetry  to  be  enjoyed. 
As  it  happens,  Mr.  Lang  has  attempted  no 
long  translations  in  verse,  but  some  of  his 
briefer  metrical  attempts  are  almost  as  happy 
as  Longfellow's,  than  which  there  can  hard- 
ly be  higher  praise.  No  doubt  the  carrying 
over  of  a  lyric  from  one  language  to  another 
is  an  easier  task  than  the  transferring  of  an 
epic,  but   nevertheless  it  is  a  feat  many  a 


194  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

minor  poet  has  failed  to  accomplish.  The 
difficulty  lies  in  the  double  duty  of  the  trans- 
lator to  present  the  thought  of  his  original 
and  to  preserve  the  form,  not  sacrificing  the 
spirit,  and  at  least  suggesting  the  atmosphere. 
Mr.  Lang  has  given  us  the  most  satisfactory 
version  of  Villon's  '  Ballade  of  Dead  Ladies ' 
(although  Rossetti  attempted  it  earlier),  and 
of  Clement  Marot's  *  Brother  Lubin '  (although 
both  Longfellow  and  Bryant  severally  essayed 
it,  neglecting  to  retain  the  ballade  form). 

In  his  brightsome  *  Ballades  in  Blue  China,' 
and  in  his  brilliant  '  Rhymes  a  la  Mode,* 
Mr.  Lang  shows  his  mastery  of  the  accom- 
plishment of  verse,  and  his  skill  in  that  de- 
partment of  poetry  which  seems  easy  and  is 
beset  with  danger.  Voltaire  tells  us  that 
difficulty  conquered  in  whatsoever  form  of  art 
is  a  large  share  of  the  merit ;  and  neither  in 
sonnet,  nor  ballade,  nor  other  fixed  form  of 
verse,  has  Mr.  Lang  shirked  any  difficulty.  If 
the  game  is  worth  the  candle,  Mrs.  Battle  is 
right  in  insisting  on  the  rigor  of  the  game. 
In  his  freer  stanzas  Mr.  Lang  has  sometimes 
something  of  the  singing  simplicity  of  Long- 
fellow and  Heine,  where  the  music  of  the 
verse  sustains  the  emotion.  In  *  Twilight  on 
Tweed  '-^ 


MR.  ANDREW   LANG  1 95 

A  mist  of  memory  broods  and  floats. 

The  Border  waters  flow: 
The  air  is  full  of  ballad  notes, 

Borne  out  of  long  ago, 

and  in  the  '  Last  Cast,*  the  angler's  thoughts 
wander  to  the  rivers  he  has  never  fished,  and 
then  go  back  to  the  streams  of  Scotland 
again : 

Unseen,  Eurotas,  southward  steal, 
Unknown,  Alpheus,  westward  glide. 

You  never  heard  the  ringing  reel. 
The  music  of  the  water-side ! 

Though  gods  have  walked  your  woods  among, 
Though  nymphs  have  fled  your  banks  along, 

You  speak  not  that  familiar  tongue 
Tweed  murmurs  like  my  cradle-song. 

My  cradle-song — nor  other  hymn 

I'd  choose,  nor  gentler  requiem  dear 

Than  Tweed's,  that  through  death's  twilight  dim 
Mourned  in  the  last  Minstrel's  ear. 

Mr.  Lang  has  taken  for  an  epigraph  Mo- 
li^re's  Ce  ne  sont  point  de  grands  vers  pom- 
peuXj  mais  de  petit  vers,  yet  he  has  at  times 
the  gift  of  lofty  lines.  It  is  only  fair  to  judge 
a  poet  by  his  highest  effort.  In  the  case  of 
the  present  poet  these  seem  to  me  to  be  two 


196  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

sonnets  on  Homer,  of  a  sustained  and  noble 
elevation.  For  love  of  Homer's  heroine  Mr. 
Lang  has  written  his  longest  poem,  *  Helen 
of  Troy,'  a  brevet-epic. 

The  face  that  launch'd  a  thousand  ships 
And  burnt  the  topless  towers  of  Ilium 

holds  its  fascination  still  across  the  centuries. 
Nor  is  "  Sweet  Helen,"  as  Faustus  calls  her, 
the  only  lady  of  Mr.  Lang's  affections.  He 
has  a  wealth  of  platonic  love  for  many  a  fair 
dame  (in  poetry),  and  for  many  a  damsel  in 
distress  (in  prose).  I  doubt  if  he  would  deny 
his  devotion  to  Beatrix  Esmond,  for  whose 
sake  the  author  of  the  '  Faithful  Fool '  (a 
comedy  once  performed  by  Her  Majesty's 
Servants)  broke  his  sword  before  his  king.  I 
question  whether  he  would  not  admit  an  affec- 
tion for  Mrs.  Rawdon  Crawley,  n^e  Sharp,  a 
green-eyed  lady  who  once  acted  Clytemnestra 
at  the  Gaunt  House  theatricals.  I  know  that 
he  confessed  a  fondness  for  Manon  Lescaut, 
a  young  person  of  reprehensible  morals,  who 
lightly  sinned  in  France  and  then  died  happily 
in  Louisiana.  And  I  think  that  he  is  ready 
to  boast  of  his  liking  for  Miss  Annie  P.  Miller 
of  Schenectady,  New  York,  an  American  girl 
who  was  known  to  her  intimates  as  "  Daisy," 


MR.  ANDREW    LANG  1 97 

and  who  died  in  Rome  after  an  imprudent 
visit  to  the  Colosseum  by  moonlight. 

Mr.  Lang  has  the  same  frank  and  sturdy 
love  for  literature  that  he  has  for  some  of  its 
captivating  female  figures.  No  reader  of  his 
could  be  in  doubt  as  to  his  ceaseless  and  loyal 
study  of  Homer  and  Theocritus,  of  Rabelais 
and  Moli^re,  of  Shakespeare  and  Thackeray. 
And  in  sports,  too,  his  tastes  are  as  wholesome 
and  as  abundant  as  his  predilections  in  let- 
ters. He  cherishes  the  cricket  of  Oxford  and 
the  golf  of  St.  Andrews  ;  he  follows  with  equal 
zest  trout- fishing  and  book- hunting.  Than 
this  last  there  is  indeed  no  better  sport ;  and 
the  poetic  author  of  '  Books  and  Bookmen ' 
has  proved  his  interest  in  the  bees  of  De 
Thou  as  well  as  in  those  that  made  the  hon- 
ey of  Hymettus.  The  original  Crichton,  we 
may  remember,  sent  an  epistle  in  verse  to 
Aldus  Manutius,  the  great  printer  -  publisher 
of  Venice. 

Mr.  Lang  is  at  his  best  when  he  writes 
about  the  Scots  and  about  the  Greeks  of  old, 
for  these  he  knows  and  loves ;  and  perhaps  he 
appears  to  least  advantage  when  he  is  writing 
about  the  American  writers  of  to-day,  since 
these  he  neither  likes  nor  cares  to  know — 
and  unsympathetic  criticism  is  foredoomed  to 


igS  ASPECTS    OF   FICTION 

sterility.  The  native  Americans  Mr.  Lang  is 
most  familiar  with  are  the  red  men,  and  he  is 
fonder  of  them,  I  fancy,  than  he  is  of  the  pale 
faces  who  have  built  towns  by  the  banks  of 
the  streams  over  which  Uncas  and  Hard-Heart 
skilfully  propelled  their  birch  -  bark  canoes. 
It  might  have  been  better,  therefore,  had  he 
not  laid  himself  open  to  Mr.  Fiske's  rebuke 
for  the  "  impatient  contempt "  with  which  he 
chose  to  speak  of  a  man  of  Lewis  H.  Morgan's 
calibre;  and  if  he  had  not  permitted  himself 
a  doubtfully  courteous  attack  on  Professor  Boy- 
esen.  And  a  more  careful  understanding  of 
American  literary  history  would  have  saved 
Mr.  Lang  from  that  farewell  to  Poe,  in  the 
*  Letters  to  Dead  Authors,*  in  which  the 
author  of  the  *  Raven  *  is  hailed  as  "  a  gentle- 
man among  canaille  !  " — surely  as  strange  an 
opinion  as  one  can  find  in  all  the  long  annals 
of  criticism. 

*  Letters  to  Dead  Authors '  is  one  of  the 
minor  masterpieces  of  letters,  the  keenest  and 
cleverest  volume  of  playful  criticism  since  the 
'  Fable  for  Critics  *  was  published  twoscore 
years  ago,  as  that  in  its  turn  was  the  brightest 
book  of  the  kind  since  '  Rejected  Addresses.' 
But  I  am  afraid  to  linger  over  this  delight- 
ful tome  for  fear  I  may  laud  it  extravagantly. 


MR.  ANDREW   LANG  1 99 

The  *  Epistle  to  Mr.  Alexander  Pope,*  a  mar- 
vel of  parody  with  many  lines  as  good  as  the 
one  which  tells  the  poet  that 

Dunces  edit  him  whom  dunces  feared ! 

the  letter  to  "  Monsieur  de  Moli^re,  Valet-de- 
Chambre  du  Roi,"  with  its  delicious  sugges- 
tion that  if  the  great  and  sad  French  humorist 
were  alive  to-day  he  might  write  a  new  com- 
edy on  les  MoHMstes  ;  the  communication  to 
Herodotus,  with  its  learned  fooling;  the  mis- 
sive to  Alexandre  Dumas,  with  its  full  current 
of  hearty  admiration  and  enjoyment  —  these 
and  many  another  I  dare  not  dwell  on,  because, 
as  I  read  in  the  letter  to  W  M.  Thackeray, 
"  there  are  many  things  that  stand  in  the  way 
of  the  critic  when  he  has  a  mind  to  praise  the 
living."  Quite  as  welcome  as  these  are  some 
of  the  essays  in  epistolary  parody  to  be  found 
in  '  Old  Friend.' 

Of  necessity  every  man  has  the  defects  of 
his  qualities,  and  the  very  success  of  Mr. 
Lang's  briefer  essays  tends  to  prevent  his 
attempting  longer  labors.  He  gets  most  out 
of  a  subject  which  may  be  treated  on  the 
instalment  plan,  when  every  portion  is  com- 
plete in  itself,  and  yet  unites  with  the  oth- 
ers to  form  a  complete  whole.     A  book  like 


200  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

*  Letters  to  Dead  Authors/  which  is  avowedly 
a  collection  of  separable  essays,  has  not  only 
a  broader  outlook  but  also  a  stronger  unity 
than  the  pleasantly  discursive  volume  on  Ox- 
ford, for  example.  A  collection  of  Tanagra 
figurines,  however,  is  in  no  wise  inferior  in 
interest  to  a  colossal  statue ;  art  has  nothing 
to  do  with  mere  bulk,  nor  has  literature.  Mr. 
Lang  cultivates  to  best  advantage  ground 
which  can  most  easily  be  cut  into  allotments. 

It  is  to  be  noted  also  that  despite  his  ex- 
treme multifariousness  there  are  certain  seg- 
ments of  life  and  of  literature  in  which  Mr. 
Lang  takes  little  interest  or  none.  Though 
he  once  wrote  a  poem  on  General  Gordon, 
and  though  he  is  ever  chaffing  Mr.  Gladstone, 
it  is  obvious  that  he  cares  not  for  the  con- 
tentions of  politics ;  and  apparently  he  cares 
as  little  for  the  disputes  of  theology,  although 
he  did.  write  a  chance  article  on  '  Robert 
Elsmere.'  For  art,  music,  and  the  drama  he 
reveals  no  natural  inclination.  We  may  guess 
that  it  has  been  his  fate  to  serve  as  art-critic, 
toiling  in  the  galleries  yearly;  but  we  can 
discover  no  signs  of  any  real  understanding 
of  art,  either  pictorial  or  plastic,  nor  of  any 
aptitude  for  it.  Of  music  he  says  almost 
nothing,  and  he  seems  to  know  as  little  about 


MR.  ANDREW    LANG 


20I 


it  as  we  know  about  the  song  the  Syrens  sang. 
And  as  for  the  acted  drama,  I  am  afraid 
that  he  is  a  heretic,  even  as  Lamb  was  heret- 
ical in  regard  to  the  performance  of  Shake- 
speare's plays.  I  hesitate  to  assert,  though 
I  am  inclined  to  believe,  that  to  him  *  As  You 
Like  It  '  and  '  Much  Ado  About  Nothing ' 
are  comedies  to  be  read  in  the  fields  or  by 
the  fireside,  rather  than  stage -plays  to  be 
acted  before  the  footlights. 


(1893.) 


II.-MR.  ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON 

The  news  of  the  death  of  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  in  that  far-off  Pacific  isle,  removed 
by  half  a  continent  from  his  native  Scotland, 
gives  a  sudden  shock  to  all  who  care  for  our 
later  literature ;  and  it  has  left  us,  I  think, 
with  a  sense  of  personal  loss,  as  though  he  had 
died  with  whom  we  had  held  delightful  inter- 
course in  the  past,  and  with  whom  we  could 
hope  to  have  many  another  stimulating  talk 
in  the  future.  This  feeling  is  doubled  and  far 
deeper  in  those  of  us  who  had  the  privilege  of 
knowing  Stevenson,  even  if  our  acquaintance 
with  him  were  as  slight  as  mine — and  I  can 
treasure  the  precious  memory  of  but  a  single 
long  afternoon  on  the  same  sofa  with  him,  in 
the  dingy  back  smoking  -  room  of  the  Savile 
Club,  one  dismal  day  of  a  London  summer 
nearly  ten  years  ago.  Chiefly  we  talked  of 
our  craft,  of  the  art  of  story  -  telling,  of  the 
technic  of  play-making.  I  remember  distinct- 
ly his  hearty  praise  of  Mark  Twain's  '  Huckle- 


MR.  ROBERT   LOUIS   STEVENSON  203 

berry  Finn/  and  his  cordial  belief  that  it  was 
a  great  book,  riper  in  art  and  ethically  richer 
than  the  'Tom  Sawyer'  of  which  it  is  the 
sequel.  I  recall  the  courtesy  and  the  frank- 
ness with  which  he  gave  me  his  opinion  of  a 
tale  of  mine  he  happened  to  have  read  recent- 
ly. Frankness,  indeed,  was  a  constant  quality 
of  his  conversation ;  and  perhaps  his  spoken 
word  was  fresher  and  freer  than  his  written 
lines — it  could  not  but  be  less  premeditated. 
With  a  very  strong  individuality,  there  was  no 
pose  in  his  manner,  no  affectation,  no  airs  and 
graces.  He  looked  unlike  other  men,  with  his 
tall  thin  figure,  his  long  thin  face,  his  nervous 
thin  hands.  As  one's  eyes  first  fell  on  him 
one  felt  that  he  was  somebody,  and  not  any- 
body at  random.  If  one  had  dropped  into 
talk  with  him  by  chance  in  a  train  or  in  a 
doctor's  waiting-room,  one  could  not  have 
resisted  the  impress  of  his  personality.  He 
talked  well,  although  not  perhaps  with  the 
spontaneous  many  -  sidedness  of  his  friend 
Fleeming  Jenkin  (whom  he  introduced  as 
Cockshot  in  his  own  essay  on  *  Talk  and 
Talkers ').  He  talked  well,  standing  up  square- 
ly against  the  other  party  to  the  conversation, 
holding  his  own  stoutly,  expressing  his  views 
in   straightforward   fashion,  with  no   beating 


204  ASPECTS  OF   FICTION 

about  the  bush,  no  questing  of  epigram,  no 
strain  of  phrase-making.  He  talked  well,  as 
he  wrote  well,  because  he  had  something  to 
say,  and  because  he  had  taught  himself  how 
best  to  say  it. 

In  the  writing  of  the  author,  as  in  the  talk 
of  the  man  himself,  perhaps  the  two  salient 
qualities  were  vigor  and  variety.  The  vigor 
every  one  has  felt  who  chances  to  have  read  a 
single  book  of  Stevenson's — and  who  of  us, 
having  read  any  one  of  them,  has  not  sat  him- 
self down  to  read  them  all?  The  variety  is 
equally  evident  if  we  look  down  the  long  list 
of  his  works — and  the  list  is  really  very  long 
indeed,  when  we  remember  that  the  books  on 
it  were  written,  all  of  them,  by  a  dying  man, 
who  finally  departed  this  life  before  he  was 
fifty.  He  was  a  poet  of  distinction,  although 
not  of  high  achievement.  Although  no  single 
one  of  his  poems  has  been  taken  home  to  the 
hearts  of  the  people  of  his  speech,  yet  *  A 
Child's  Garden  of  Verses'  is  as  unlike  any 
rymes  of  earlier  poets  as  any  volume  of  verse 
of  this  last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
He  was  a  writer  of  travel-sketches,  and  here 
again  he  revealed  the  same  originality ;  and 
he  was  able  to  describe  '  Edinburgh,'  his  boy- 
hood's home,  with  the   same   freedom   from 


MR.  ROBERT   LOUIS   STEVENSON  205 

staleness,  the  same  eschewal  of  the  common- 
place, that  gave  freshness  to  '  Silverado  Squat- 
ters ;'  while  in  *  Travels  with  a  Donkey '  and 
*  An  Inland  Voyage '  he  achieved  a  detach- 
ment of  the  man  from  his  circumstances 
unattempted  by  anybody  before,  excepting 
only  the  author  of  *  Walden.*  He  was  a  biog- 
rapher and  a  literary  critic,  and  although  his 
life  of  '  Fleeming  Jenkin '  is  the  least  suc- 
cessful of  his  works,  being  marred  by  a  hint 
of  a  patronizing  manner  entirely  unbecoming 
towards  a  man  of  the  character  and  accomplish- 
ment of  "  The  Flamer,"  still  the  task  was  done 
in  workmanlike  fashion ;  and  Stevenson's  other 
sketches  of  authors  in  his  *  Familiar  Studies 
of  Men  and  Books,'  and  elsewhere,  are  free 
from  this  defect.  It  is  to  be  noted  here  that 
he  was  one  of  the  rare  British  critics  capable 
of  appreciating  Walt  Whitman  with  sanity, 
while  another  American,  Thoreau,  was  per- 
haps almost  the  strongest  of  all  the  influences 
which  moulded  him — quite  the  strongest  after 
Scott,  I  think.  He  was  an  essayist,  and 
among  the  most  piquant  and  individual  of  his 
time,  an  essayist  of  the  race  and  lineage  of 
Montaigne,  of  Lamb,  and  of  Lowell,  interested 
in  life  as  much  as  in  literature,  seeing  for  him- 
self, always  inquiring  and  always  acquisitive, 


2o6  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

having  philosophical  standards  of  his  own,  and 
using  them  to  measure  men  and  manners,  and 
yet  never  intolerant,  though  ever  sincere.  He 
was  a  dramatist  at  least  one  of  whose  plays, 
*  Deacon  Brodie,'  was  fairly  successful  in  with- 
standing the  touchstone  test  of  the  actual 
theatre;  yet  it  must  be  admitted  that  his 
dramas,  written,  all  of  them,  in  conjunction 
with  Mr.  W.  E.  Henley,  have  rather  the 
robustious  manner  of  that  burly  writer  than 
the  commingled  delicacy  and  force  of  Steven- 
son's other  work.  And,  lastly,  he  was  also  a 
story-teller. 

It  is  as  a  story-teller  that  he  won  his  widest 
triumphs;  it  is  as  a  story-teller  that  he  is 
most  likely  to  linger  on  the  shelves  of  our 
grandchildren's  libraries;  it  was  as  a  story- 
teller that  he  revealed  his  greatest  variety. 
First  and  last  he  tried  his  hand  at  four  kinds 
of  fiction.  In  the  'New  Arabian  Nights,* 
with  its  sequel,  the  *  Dynamiter,'  he  revived 
the  tale  of  fantasy  with  an  inventive  ingenuity 
unequalled  certainly  since  Poe  published  the 
'  Tales  of  the  Grotesque  and  the  Arabesque.' 
In  the  *  Strange  Case  of  Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr. 
Hyde,'  and  in  '  Markheim,'  he  gave  us  the 
strongest  stories  of  introspection  and  imagi- 
nation since  Hawthorne's  *  Scarlet  Letter '  and 


MR.  ROBERT  LOUIS   STEVENSON  20 7 

*  Marble    Faun.*       In  *  Kidnapped  *    and    in 

*  David  Balfour '  and  in  the  *  Master  of  Bal- 
lantrae '  he  presented  us  with  the  most  vivid 
and  actual  of  Scotch  romances  since  Scott 
came  home  from  vacant  exile  to  die  at  Abbots- 
ford.  And  in  the  'Wrecker'  and  certain  of 
its  fellows  he  tried,  not  without  a  large  measure 
of  success,  to  varnish  with  sheer  art  the  vulgar 
detective-story,  and  to  give  a  tincture  of  litera- 
ture to  the  tale  of  crime  committed  and  the 
secret  ferreted  out  at  last.  And  even  now, 
though  it  has  been  easy  to  show  that  as  a 
teller  of  tales  Stevenson's  versatility  has  thus 
four  phases,  *  Treasure  Island '  has  to  be  left 
out  of  the  account,  simply  because  it  refuses 
to  classify  itself  with  the  others — perhaps  be- 
cause it  prefers  to  take  its  chances  with  *  Rob- 
inson Crusoe.' 

Stevenson  had  his  theory  of  fiction,  and  his 
practice  was  like  his  preaching — which  is  an- 
other proof  of  his  originality.  In  the  evolu- 
tion of  the  modern  novel  from  the  primitive 
romance,  in  the  progress  first  from  the  Impos- 
sible to  the  Improbable,  and  then  from  the 
Probable  to  the  Inevitable,  he  refused  to  go  to 
the  end. 

He  preferred  the  Improbable  to  the  Inevi- 
table.    He  was  a  romanticist  to  the  backbone, 


2o8  ASPECTS  OF   FICTION 

a  reactionary,  so  those  of  us  think  who  most 
relish  in  literature  the  essence  of  actual  life. 
But  though  he  fought  for  his  own  hand,  and 
defended  his  own  doctrine  stanchly,  with  char- 
acteristic good  faith  he  tried  to  understand 
the  point  of  view  of  those  with  whom  he  con- 
tended. Himself  liking  the  dramatic  novel, 
as  he  called  it,  the  bold  romance  wherein  is 
set  forth  the  strife  of  passionate  character 
against  passionate  character,  he  did  not  ap- 
prove of  Mr.  Henry  James's  habit  of  keeping 
the  scene-a-faire  behind  closed  doors.  Yet  in 
his  reply  to  Mr.  James's  paper  on  the  *  Art  of 
Fiction,'  a  reply  which  he  modestly  entitled 
*A  Humble  Remonstrance,'  he  combated  the 
views  of  the  author  of  '  Daisy  Miller '  with  the 
utmost  courtesy;  and  in  a  postscript  to  the 
same  paper  he  recorded  his  dissent  from  what 
he  called  the  "narrow  convictions"  of  Mr. 
Howells ;  but  he  seized  the  occasion  to  declare 
the  author  of  *  Silas  Lapham  '  to  be  "  a  poet,  a 
finished  artist,  a  man  in  love  with  the  ap- 
pearance of  life,  a  cunning  reader  of  the 
mind." 

Being  a  Scotsman,  Stevenson  was  nearer  to 
the  American  than  the  Englishman  can  be, 
and  he  had  a  quicker  willingness  to  under- 
stand the  American  character.     As  a  Scots- 


MR.  ROBERT   LOUIS  STEVENSON  209 

man,  also,  he  had  keener  artistic  perceptions 
than  an  Englishman  is  likely  to  have.  He 
was  not  only  a  born  story-teller,  as  Scott  was, 
but  he  was  also  a  master  of  the  craft,  a  loving, 
devoted,  untiring  student  of  the  art,  which 
Scott  was  not.  He  never  attained  to  the 
mastery  of  form  which  Guy  de  Maupassant 
derived  as  a  tradition  from  the  French  classics ; 
his  stories  are  often  straggling.  And  he  had 
not  the  relish  for  fresh  technicalities  which  is 
one  of  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling's  peculiarities.  I 
remember  Fleeming  Jenkin  telling  me  how 
his  sons,  who  had  sailed  a  boat  from  their 
earliest  youth,  were  sorely  puzzled  by  the  im- 
possible manoeuvres  of  the  ship  in  *  Treasure 
Island,'  and  how  they  came  to  their  father 
despairingly  to  declare  that  "  this  never  hap- 
pened, did  it  ?     It  couldn't,  could  it  ?" 

Not  only  these  deficiencies  have  been  dwelt 
on,  but  the  absence  has  been  pointed  out  of 
what  is  known  as  the  "  female  interest "  in 
his  stories ;  and  it  is  a  fact  that  almost  the 
only  satisfactory  and  enticing  petticoats  of  Mr. 
Stevenson's  draping  are  in  *  David  Balfour.* 
But  these  defects  are  as  naught  against  the 
narrative  skill  of  Stevenson,  his  unfailing  fer- 
tility of  invention,  his  firm  grasp  of  character, 
his  insight  into  the  springs  of  human  nature. 


a  10  ASPECTS  OF  FICTION 

and,  above  all,  his  contagious  interest  in  the 
tale  he  is  telling. 

Whether  it  is  a  tale  he  is  telling,  or  a  drama 
with  its  swift  sharp  dialogue,  or  an  essay  ram- 
bling and  ambling  skilfully  to  its  unseen  end, 
the  style  is  always  the  style  of  a  man  who  has 
learnt  how  to  make  words  bend  to  his  bidding. 
He  writes  as  one  to  whom  the  parts  of  speech 
must  needs  obey.  He  had  a  picked  vocabu- 
lary at  his  command,  and  he  was  ever  on  the 
watch  for  the  unexpected  phrase.  He  strove 
incessantly  to  escape  from  the  hackneyed  form 
of  words,  and  cut-and-dried  commonplaces  of 
speech — and  no  doubt  the  effort  is  evident 
sometimes,  although  the  instances  are  rare 
enough.  There  is  at  times,  it  is  true,  more 
than  a  hint  of  preciousness,  but  he  never  fell 
into  the  self-consciousness  which  marred  many 
of  the  late  Mr.  Walter  Pater's  periods.  *  Prince 
Otto,'  written  obviously  under  the  influence 
of  Mr.  George  Meredith,  had  more  of  these 
aniline  patches,  as  it  was  also  the  feeblest  of 
his  fictions.  The  open  letter  on  Father  Da- 
mien,  for  example,  had  a  sturdy  directness 
of  statement  which  suggested  Walt  Whitman 
again. 

The  impression  of  mere  dilettante  idling 
which  one  may  get  at  first  from  some  of  the 


MR.  ROBERT  LOUIS   STEVENSON  211 

earlier  essays  is  evanescent.  As  Mr.  James 
put  it,  much  as  Stevenson  "  cares  for  his  phrase, 
he  cares  more  for  life,  and  for  a  certain  tran- 
scendently  lovable  part  of  it."  And  herein  Mr. 
James  saw  "  the  respectable,  desirable  moral." 
To  me,  at  least,  there  was  no  need  to  seek  a 
moral  between  the  lines,  for  was  not  Steven- 
son a  true  Scotchman,  and  could  he  ever  for- 
get the  chief  end  of  man  ?  Only  a  Scotsman 
could  have  written  the  *  Strange  Case  of  Dr. 
Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde,'  as  only  a  New-Eng- 
lander  could  have  written  the  *  Scarlet  Letter.' 
There  is  an  inheritance  from  the  Covenanters 
and  a  memory  of  the  Shorter  Catechism  in 
Stevenson's  bending  and  twisting  the  dark 
problems  of  our  common  humanity  to  serve 
as  the  core  of  his  tales. 

It  is  curious  that  a  writer  so  independent  as 
Stevenson  and  so  various  should  have  been 
tempted  so  often  into  collaboration ;  but  it  is 
a  fact  that  no  man  of  letters  of  our  time  and 
our  language  has  taken  more  literary  partners. 
With  Mr.  W.  E.  Henley  he  composed  at  least 
four  plays,  and  they  are  to  be  set  down  rather 
to  Mr.  Henley's  credit,  as  I  have  suggested, 
than  to  Stevenson's.  With  Mrs.  Stevenson  he 
wrote  the  *  Dynamiter ;'  and  with  her  son,  Mr. 
Lloyd  Osbourne,  he  told  three  tales,  the  *  Wrong 


212  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Box,'  the  '  Wrecker/  and  the  '  Ebb-Tide/  in 
which  we  find  a  more  open  humor  than  in  his 
other  stories.  But,  as  those  only  know  who 
have  themselves  collaborated  in  good  faith,  it 
is  always  impossible  to  disentangle  the  contri- 
bution of  one  partner  from  that  of  the  other, 
if,  indeed,  there  has  been  not  a  mere  mechan- 
ical mixture,  but  a  true  chemical  union.  What- 
ever associates  Stevenson  had  now  and  again, 
he  was  the  senior  partner  always,  and  it  was 
his  trade-mark  that  warranted  the  goods  of 
the  firm. 

(1894.) 


ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 


ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

I.-THE   GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING 

Whenever  the  annalist  of  English  litera- 
ture shall  record  the  history  of  the  year  1894, 
one  of  the  most  curious  items  he  will  have  to 
set  down  in  his  account  cannot  but  be  the 
sudden  success  achieved  in  fiction  by  a  mature 
practitioner  of  another  art.  To  take  all  hearts 
by  storm,  Trilby  had  only  to  appear,  and  no 
sooner  did  she  show  herself  than  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  readers  lay  prostrate  at  her  in- 
comparable feet.  Irresistible  as  was  Mr.  Du 
Maurier's  charming  heroine,  and  however  ac- 
ceptable the  tale  of  Trilby's  misadventures 
may  be  as  a  reproduction  of  actual  life,  it  is 
not  a  masterpiece  of  narrative  art.  Delightful 
as  it  is,  full  as  it  is  of  the  freshness  of  youth 
and  of  the  joy  of  living,  it  could  easily  be  torn 
to  pieces,  as  a  story  merely,  were  any  critic 
hard-hearted  enough  for  the  hateful  task.  No 
one  knows  better  than  Mr.  Du  Maurier  that 


2l5  ASPECTS  OF   FICTION 

his  unpretentious  romance  is  not  savamment 
fild,  as  he  might  say  himself.  He  has  not 
studied  fiction  as  an  art  diligently  from  his 
youth  up ;  and  it  was  late  in  life,  and  almost 
by  accident,  that  he  discovered  his  ownership 
of  the  gift  of  story-telling. 

The  gift  of  story-telling !  This  it  is  which 
Mr.  Du  Maurier  has,  and  which  he  obviously 
did  not  know  he  had,  or  he  would  have  re- 
vealed it  earlier  in  his  career.  It  is  this  gift 
of  story-telling  which  Mr.  Du  Maurier  has  un- 
expectedly found  himself  to  possess  in  a  high 
degree  that  enables  him  so  to  enchant  us  with 
his  tale  that  we  overlook  all  the  evidences  of 
his  inexpertness  as  a  maker  of  romances.  It 
is  this  native  faculty  of  narrative  which  the 
writer  of  fiction  must  needs  have  as  a  condi- 
tion precedent  to  the  practice  of  his  craft,  and 
without  some  small  portion  of  which  the  con- 
scious art  of  the  most  highly  trained  novelist 
is  of  no  avail. 

This  gift  of  story-telling  can  exist  indepen- 
dently of  any  other  faculty.  It  may  be  all 
that  its  possessor  has.  He  might  be  wholly 
without  any  of  the  qualifications  of  the  litera- 
tor;  he  might  lack  education  and  intelligence; 
he  might  have  no  knowledge  of  the  world,  no 
experience  of  life,  and  no  insight  into  charac- 


THE   GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING  21  7 

ter ;  he  might  be  devoid  of  style,  and  even  of 
grammar ; — all  these  deficiencies  are  as  nothing 
if  only  he  have  the  gift  of  story-telling.  With- 
out that,  he  may  have  all  the  other  qualifica- 
tions and  still  fail  as  a  writer  of  fiction.  With 
that,  even  though  without  them,  he  may  make 
sure  of  an  audience  whenever  and  wherever  he 
shall  choose  to  take  up  his  tale. 

In  so  far  as  the  gift  of  story-telling  exists  in- 
dependently, it  is  like  the  ability  to  make  an 
effective  speech,  the  knack  of  writing  an  acta- 
ble play,  the  power  of  acquiring  money ;  and 
its  possession  is  no  proof  whatever  that  the 
possessor  is  abler  than  his  fellows  except  in 
that  one  direction.  That  a  man  succeeds  in 
anything  is  evidence  that  he  had  not  mischos- 
en  his  calling;  that  whatever  his  general  in- 
telligence may  be,  and  however  slight  it  may 
be,  he  has  at  least  a  full  share  of  the  special 
intelligence  needed  in  the  art  in  question  (be 
that  only  the  humble  art  of  making  money). 
Here  we  have  an  explanation  of  the  surprise 
which  has  shocked  us  often  on  meeting  the 
maker  of  an  immense  fortune  when  he  revealed 
himself  as  a  man  of  no  great  intelligence.  It 
accounts  for  the  sharp  disappointment  we  have 
felt  on  finding  that  the  musician,  the  painter, 
the  tragedian  of  high  rank  in  his  profession 


2l8  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

may  be  a  man  of  no  more  than  ordinary  intel- 
lectual force. 

A  chance  remark  of  a  distinguished  French 
comedian  first  suggested  to  me  this  simple  ex- 
planation. I  had  met  a  member  of  the  com- 
pany, and  I  had  found  him  almost  stupid, 
although  as  a  performer  he  was  more  than 
acceptable;  and  I  asked  my  friend  how  this 
could  be,  that  so  dull  a  man  could  be  so  good 
an  actor.  He  shrugged  his  shoulders  and 
smiled,  and  answered  :  "  Why  not  ?  It  is  just 
the  same  in  the  other  arts."  I  was  forced  to 
admit  that  I  had  known  musicians  also  who 
had  nothing  to  recommend  them  but  their 
music.     "  Painters  too,"  he  returned.     "  Look 

at  M ,  the  greatest  painter  we  have,  and 

he's  an  old  chump !"  for  so  I  venture  freely 
to  render  the  untranslatable  French  phrase 
vieille  ganache.  "  It  is  the  same  in  all  the 
arts :  to  succeed  in  any  of  them  one  needs  the 
intelligence  of  that  art — one  doesn't  need  any 
other  intelligence." 

A  further  consideration  has  led  me  to  make 
a  threefold  classification  of  successful  actors — 
first,  those  who  have  the  histrionic  faculty  and 
nothing  else ;  second,  those  who  are  intelligent, 
and  who  make  their  intelligence  a  substitute 
for  the  natural  gift ;  and  third,  those  few  who, 


THE  GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING  219 

besides  being  born  actors,  are  also  men  of  in- 
tellect and  character.  Charles  Lamb's  friend 
Munden  may  be  taken  as  the  type  of  the  actor 
who  is  an  actor  only.  Munden  must  have  been 
a  great  comedian ;  but  it  is  only  as  a  comedian 
that  he  was  great ;  in  the  ordinary  relations  of 
life  he  was  a  very  ordinary  man.  Macready, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  an  instance  of  the  suc- 
cess with  which  a  deficiency  of  the  native  his- 
trionic faculty  can  be  supplemented  by  force 
of  character  and  by  general  intelligence.  Ma- 
cready was  not  a  born  actor ;  he  was  a  made 
actor.  Lewes — than  whom  there  is  no  shrewder 
English  dramatic  critic — declares  his  belief  that 
Macready  would  have  made  his  way  to  the 
front  either  at  the  bar  or  in  the  Church  quite 
as  well  as  he  did  on  the  stage.  But  who  could 
imagine  Munden  in  any  other  calling  than  the 
comedian's? 

A  large  majority  of  the  actors  of  any  time 
belong  to  the  first  of  these  classes ;  they  act 
because  "  it  is  their  nature  to  ";  their  readings 
and  their  gestures  are  right  more  often  than 
not  from  unconscious  intuition,  not  from  any 
reason  they  could  give.  Smaller  and  yet  al- 
ways well  represented  is  the  second  division, 
men  and  women  of  little  natural  endowment 
for  the  theatre,  making  up  for  this  deficiency 


220  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

by  exceeding  carefulness,  by  conscientious 
study,  by  sheer  force  of  determination.  These 
are  the  performers  who  are  coldly  praised  as 
"scholarly."  In  London  I  once  asked  a  friend 
who  really  understands  the  theatre  what  sort 
of  an  actor  so-and-so  was.  "So-and-so?"  he 
answered ;  "  he  is  a  most  scholarly  actor,  un- 
derstanding his  art  thoroughly ;  but  sooner 
than  see  him  act,  I'd  rather  be  all  alone  by 
myself  in  a  dark  room  !" 

The  third  class,  consisting  of  those  who  have 
intellect  and  character  and  culture  as  well  as  a 
natural  gift  for  their  vocation,  is  as  rare  on  the 
stage  as  it  is  in  the  studio  or  in  the  library ;  it 
must  always  be  very  rare  everywhere.  The 
typical  actor  having  this  double  endowment 
was  David  Garrick,  who  was  at  once  the  first 
tragedian  of  his  time  and  the  first  comedian, 
who  was  the  foremost  manager  and  one  of  the 
leading  dramatists,  who  wrote  delightful  light 
verse,  and  who  held  his  own  as  a  talker  with 
the  best  men  of  The  Club,  and  who  was  alto- 
gether the  marvel  of  the  stage.  In  our  own 
days  it  is  not  difficult  to  designate  actors  who 
have  not  only  the  histrionic  faculty  in  a  very 
high  degree,  but  who  have  also,  like  Garrick,  a 
full  share  of  culture  and  character  and  intel- 
lect.    Mr.  Joseph  Jefferson  here  in  America, 


THE   GIFT   OF   STORY-TELLING  221 

M.  Coquelin  in  Paris,  Herr  Barnay  in  Berlin — 
these  are  among  the  first  names  that  now  come 
to  mind. 

A  triple  classification  like  this  here  attempted 
for  actors  can  be  made  for  all  other  artists — for 
painters,  for  sculptors,  and  for  architects,  for 
orators,  for  poets,  and  for  dramatists.  All  fall 
into  the  three  divisions — those  with  the  special 
temperament,  those  with  general  ability,  and 
the  scanty  few  who  have  both  the  general  abil- 
ity and  the  special  temperament.  Turner,  for 
example,  was  born  to  be  a  painter,  and  he  knew 
nothing  but  how  to  paint ;  Washington  AU- 
ston  made  himself  a  painter  by  indomitable  per- 
severance ;  while  Michael  Angelo  had  ability 
of  many  kinds,  and  in  a  high  degree.  To  turn 
from  one  art  to  another,  Shell  was  a  born 
speech-maker,  and  Whitfield  had  the  same  gift 
of  eloquence,  but  neither  of  them  had  anything 
to  say  which  has  survived ;  while  Burke  was 
the  profoundest  political  thinker  of  his  cen- 
tury, yet  he  had  so  little  of  the  natural  gift  of 
the  orator  that  his  delivery  of  the  speeches  we 
still  study  emptied  the  House  of  Commons. 
Strangely  infrequent  is  the  power  of  impress- 
ing an  immediate  audience  with  words  that 
will  also  abide  after  the  interest  of  the  occa- 
sion has  departed.     Daniel  Webster  achieved 


22  2  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

this  triumph  more  than  oncCj^ though  he  never 
equalled  the  pregnant  simplicity  of  Lincoln's 
Gettysburg  speech,  which  carried  .away  the 
listening  thousands  on  the  battle-field  then, 
and  now  is  cherished  in  the  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  memories. 

Among  the  dramatists  the  second  of  these 
three  classes  is  very  small  indeed.  In  the 
making  of  a  play  to  please  the  broad  public 
(to  which  the  dramatist  must  always  appeal), 
temperament  counts  for  far  more  than  culture. 
Without  the  inborn  dramaturgic  faculty  the 
ablest  man  of  letters  finds  himself  absolutely 
at  a  loss.  This  dramaturgic  faculty  is  wholly 
distinct  from  literary  ability ;  and  it  sometimes 
is  to  be  found  in  the  possession  of  men  having 
little  or  no  tincture  of  literature.  And  this  is 
why  critics,  trained  to  appreciate  purely  literary 
qualities,  so  often  fail  wholly  to  understand  the 
success  of  a  popular  play,  the  literary  defects 
of  which  are  too  obvious ;  this  is  why  they  are 
so  often  forced  to  wonder  at  the  failure  of  the 
brilliantly  written  comedy  of  a  man  of  letters 
who  happens  to  be  without  the  dramatic  tem- 
perament. It  is  the  born  playwright  who  has 
interested  the  broad  public  at  all  times;  he  has 
interested  it  none  the  less  when  he  chanced 
also  to  have  literature.     As  a  substitute  for 


THE   GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING  223 

the  Specific  gift  literary  art  was  inadmissible, 
but  as  a  supplement  it  was  welcome.  It  is 
style  alone  that  survives;  and  so  most  of  the 
plays  of  the  past  which  had  the  widest  popu- 
larity have  sunk  out  of  sight,  and  their  makers* 
names  are  forgotten. 

Lamb  calls  Heywood  a  "prose  Shake- 
speare ;"  and  of  all  the  early  Elizabethan 
dramatists  none  was  more  acceptable  to  the 
play-goers  of  the  period  than  Heywood  ;  he 
had  the  dramaturgic  faculty,  he  was  a  born 
playwright,  but  it  was  only  now  and  again 
that  he  rose  to  the  level  of  literature.  Ben 
Jonson  sought  to  make  up  for  his  lack  of  the 
natural  gift  by  scholarship  and  energy  and 
toil ;  and  in  most  cases  he  had  his  labor  for 
his  pains,  and  he  took  his  pay  in  contempt  for 
those  who  refused  to  be  amused  by  his  hard 
work.  Shakespeare  had  the  native  endow- 
ment, and  he  was  the  best  "  Shakescene  of 
them  all" — the  most  popular  playwright  of 
his  time.  That  he  was  the  hack-dramatist  of 
his  theatre,  patching  up  old  plays  to  tempt 
the  groundlings,  and  knowing  every  trick  of 
the  trade  and  up  to  every  device  of  the  craft, 
did  not  prevent  him  from  being  also  the  great- 
est of  English  poets.  But  it  is  not  the  abiding 
beauty  of  his  verse,  it   is  not   his  profound 


2  24  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

insight  into  human  recognized  character,  it  is 
his  native  gift  of  play-making  by  contemporary 
play-goers  which  keeps  a  third  of  his  come- 
dies and  tragedies  on  the  boards  now  nearly 
three  hundred  years  after  his  death. 

Just  as  one  man  succeeds  in  the  theatre 
because  he  is  a  born  playwright,  despite  his 
deficiency  in  all  other  qualities,  so  another 
man  wins  his  way  as  a  poet  because  he  is  a 
born  lyrist.  If  he  have  but  the  gift  of  song, 
we  have  no  right  to  expect  from  him  any- 
thing else.  From  a  songster  it  is  absurd  to 
demand  thought ;  if  he  but  give  us  melody, 
that  is  enough.  A  poet  may  be  a  literary  vir- 
tuoso of  incomparable  technic,  like  Th^ophile 
Gautier,  for  example  —  a  surpassingly  skilful 
artist  in  words,  and  quite  incapable  of  any- 
thing fairly  to  be  called  an  original  thought. 
His  verse  may  be  a  marvellous  instrument  for 
the  reproduction  of  tones  and  tints  and  deli- 
cate shades  of  sensation  and  emotion,  and  he 
himself  may  have  a  small  mind  and  a  little 
soul.  There  are  those  who  have  proclaimed 
Wordsworth  to  be  a  thinker  as  well  as  a  poet, 
but  they  would  be  daring  indeed  who  should 
set  up  such  a  claim  for  Tennyson,  than  whom 
the  literary  history  of  England  records  no 
more  accomplished  master  of  the  art  of  verse. 


THE  GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING  225 

Yet  the  late  poet-laureate  eagerly  assimilated 
much  of  the  best  thought  of  his  time,  and 
thus  nourished  his  stanzas  and  gave  them 
substance  and  solidity.  But  the  French  poet 
who  was  Tennyson's  contemporary  and  rival 
was  less  receptive;  it  might  almost  be  said 
that  Victor  Hugo  was  as  impervious  to 
thought  as  he  was  to  humor.  He  was  a  singer 
of  lyrics,  a  painter  of  pictures  in  rhyme ;  just 
a  poet  and  nothing  else.  As  one  of  the  acutest 
of  recent  French  critics,  M.  Jules  Lemaitre, 
has  put  it,  compactly,  "A  man  for  whom 
Robespierre,  Saint-Just,  and  even  Hebert  and 
Marat,  are  giants,  for  whom  Bossuet  and  De 
Maistre  are  odious  monsters,  and  for  whom 
Nisard  and  M^rim^e  are  imbeciles,  this  man 
may  have  genius,  but,  beyond  all  question, 
genius  is  all  he  has."  And  yet  no  one  has 
been  ampler  than  M.  Lemaitre  in  praise  of 
Hugo  as  a  poet  pure  and  simple.  The  author 
of  *  Odes  et  Ballades '  was  the  greatest  of  French 
lyrists,  making  a  stubborn  and  rebellious  lan- 
guage soar  and  sing,  and  doing  this  easily, 
abundantly,  unceasingly. 

It  was  the  gift  of  poetry  that  Hugo  had, 
and  Tennyson,  just  as  Munden  had  the  gift  of 
comedy,  as  Sheil  had  the  gift  of  eloquence,  as 
Turner  had  the  gift  of  painting — ^just  as  Mr. 


2  26  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

Du  Maurier  has  the  gift  of  story-telling.  No 
doubt  Mr.  Du  Maurier  has  other  qualities  also 
— a  pleasant  humor,  for  example,  and  broad 
sympathy ;  but  these  would  all  be  of  little 
avail  if  he  had  not  also  the  gift  of  story-telling. 
The  possessor  of  this  precious  birthright  seems 
to  divine  many  of  the  secrets  of  the  art  of 
narrative  almost  intuitively,  and  he  has  no 
difficulty  in  holding  our  attention  while  he 
spins  the  yarn.  However  inexperienced  he 
may  be,  he  is  rarely  ineffective ;  and  at  his 
first  attempt  he  often  does  easily  and  without 
effort  what  those  who  have  not  the  gift  must 
take  thought  to  accomplish,  and  attain  only 
after  striving  and  straining. 

The  gift  of  story-telling  all  the  most  popular 
romancers  of  the  time  possess  and  must  possess 
or  else  they  would  not  have  won  popularity. 
And  sometimes  this  gift  is  all  their  having. 
Sometimes  they  own  little  or  no  more,  having 
neither  wit  nor  wisdom,  neither  style  nor  psy- 
chology— possessing,  indeed,  no  general  ideas 
even  about  the  art  they  practise  with  applause. 
This  is  how  it  comes  to  pass  that  more  than 
one  of  the  purveyors  of  popular  fiction  of  our 
day  has  made  a  sorry  spectacle  of  himself  when 
he  took  it  upon  himself  to  discourse  upon  his 
own  art  and  to  discuss  its  secrets.    The  public 


THE   GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING 


227 


had  read  his  books  because  he  was  a  born 
teller  of  tales,  but  for  criticism  of  craftmanship 
he  had  no  gift,  and  in  attempting  it  he  was 
merely  giving  himself  away. 

As  one  glances  down  the  long  and  interest- 
ing history  of  fiction,  one  can  readily  pick  out 
the  names  of  novelists  belonging  to  one  and 
another  of  the  three  classes.  And  yet  the 
writer  who  has  the  gift  of  story-telling  and 
nothing  else,  who  has  neither  style  nor  humor 
nor  the  ability  to  create  character,  who  is  a 
spinner  of  yarns  only,  has  no  staying  power ; 
however  immense  his  immediate  popularity 
may  be,  he  sinks  into  oblivion  almost  as  soon 
as  he  ceases  to  produce.  Perhaps  there  are 
no  more  typical  specimens  of  the  story-teller 
pure  and  simple  than  the  late  Ponson  du 
T^rrail  in  France  (the  historian  of  the  mis- 
deeds of  Rocambole),  and  the  late  "  Hugh 
Conway  "  in  England  (the  author  of  '  Called 
Back ').  Perhaps  it  would  be  invidious  to  point 
out  any  living  writers  of  tales  belonging  in 
this  class;  and  yet  the  temptation  to  name 
names  is  wellnigh  irresistible. 

In  the  second  division,  containing  those 
without  the  native  faculty  and  yet  with  ability 
which  they  impress  as  a  substitute  for  the 
gift,  it  is  probably  perfectly  fair  to  include  Dr; 


2  28  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Johnson.  *  Rasselas'  reveals  no  natural  endow- 
ment for  the  pursuit  of  fiction  ;  it  is  the  result 
of  main  strength  misapplied.  Perhaps  also 
Diderot  is  to  be  included  in  this  class,  for  the 
author  of '  La  Religieuse  *  had  the  gift  of  story- 
telling as  little  as  he  had  the  dramaturgic 
faculty.  It  may  be  unfair  to  Diderot,  whose 
intelligence  was  alert  and  swift,  to  link  his 
name  with  that  of  Johnson,  who  moved  pon- 
derously ;  and  yet  they  are  both  examples  of 
the  inadequacy  of  intellect  alone  as  an  equip- 
ment for  the  practice  of  an  art  without  some 
portion,  however  slight,  of  natural  endowment. 
For  the  spinning  of  yarns,  the  intelligence 
alone  will  not  suffice. 

The  two  great  contemporaries  Boccaccio 
and  Chaucer  had  both  the  gift  of  story-telling 
in  fullest  measure ;  they  were  also  among  the 
most  accomplished  and  most  intellectual  men 
of  their  time.  Boccaccio  was  a  scholar;  he 
was  perhaps  the  first  Italian  to  study  Greek ; 
he  was  chosen  to  deliver  the  earliest  course  of 
lectures  on  Dante.  Chaucer  was  also  a  scholar ; 
he  was  a  traveller  and  a  man  of  affairs.  Both 
of  them  were  conscious  artists,  masters  of  the 
narrative  art,  treating  the  raw  material  they 
found  ready  to  their  hands  with  the  utmost 
freedom,   and   understanding   all  the   advan- 


THE  GIFT  OF  STORY-TELLING  229 

tages  of  selection,  unity,  compression,  variety, 
proportion,  movement,  and  climax.  Their 
tales  can  be  studied  to-day  as  masterpieces  of 
craftsmanship.  They  had  the  gift  of  story- 
telling, and  also  the  knowledge  how  best  to 
put  that  having  to  usury,  and  how  to  make  it 
return  the  fullest  revenue. 

The  two  great  writers  whose  names  come 
next  in  chronological  sequence  in  the  history 
of  fiction  are  Rabelais  and  Cervantes.  The 
Frenchman  and  the  Spaniard  had  a  profounder 
philosophy  of  life  than  the  Italian  and  the 
Englishman,  but  they  lacked  the  sense  of  art, 
as  the  most  careless  contrast  would  show.  The 
tales  of  Boccaccio  and  of  Chaucer  are  swift 
and  beautifully  proportioned,  while  the  stories 
of  Rabelais  and  Cervantes  are  slow  and  lum- 
bering. The  involute  clumsiness  of  *  Don  Quix- 
ote,' considered  merely  as  a  specimen  of  nar- 
rative art,  is  indisputable  ;  and  the  slovenliness 
of  its  structure,  the  negligence  of  the  narrator, 
and  his  insufficient  respect  for  the  master- 
piece which  he  had  begotten  unawares,  are 
equally  evident.  But  careless  as  is  the  scheme 
of  *  Don  Quixote,'  it  is  superior  to  the  wilful 
and  sprawling  formlessness  of  the  chronicle  of 
*  Gargantua.'  The  gift  of  story  -  telling,  the 
sheer  ability  to  hold  the  reader's  attention  by 


230  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

a  string  of  adventures,  put  together  almost  at 
hap-hazard,  and  told  almost  as  artlessly — this 
both  Rabelais  and  Cervantes  must  needs  have 
had. 

There  is  no  necessity  now  to  attempt  an 
analysis  of  this  gift  and  a  declaration  of  its 
constituent  elements,  even  if  it  were  possible 
to  do  so — which  may  be  doubted.  What  is 
obvious  enough  is  that  it  is  sometimes  accom- 
panied by  the  keenest  understanding  of  the 
principles  of  narrative  art,  and  sometimes  it  is 
not  so  accompanied.  Those  who  possess  it 
may  also  have  knowledge  and  wisdom,  or 
they  may  not  own  these  additional  qualifica- 
tions. But  without  some  small  share  of  this 
native  faculty  no  novelist  can  hope  to  attain 
his  purpose — no  novelist,  and  no  historian. 

The  author  of  the  '  Short  History  of  the 
English  People '  once  defined  the  novel  as 
*'  history  that  did  not  happen ;"  and  turning  this 
happy  suggestion  inside  out,  we  may  call  his- 
tory "  fiction  that  did  happen."  Macaulay 
deliberately  desired  to  write  a  history  of  Eng- 
land which  should  be  read  as  eagerly  as  the 
latest  novel,  and  he  had  his  wish.  Probably 
Green  was  inspired  by  a  similar  motive,  and 
indubitably  he  achieved  a  similar  triumph. 
The  novel  which  Motley  once  wrote,  and  the 


THE   GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING  231 

novel  which  Parkman  once  wrote,  failed  to  find 
favor  in  the  eyes  of  the  general  reader,  and 
dropped  swiftly  out  of  sight ;  but  yet  who  could 
deny  the  gift  of  story-telling  to  the  historian 
of  the  siege  of  Antwerp,  or  to  the  historian  of 
the  conspiracy  of  Pontiac  ?  Prescott  had  the 
gift  also  when  he  told  the  most  marvellous  of 
all  true  stories,  the  tale  of  the  conquest  of 
Mexico  by  Cortez  and  his  companions.  Froude 
had  it,  even  if  he  lacked  other  indispensable 
qualities  of  the  great  historian  ;  and — to  take  a 
long  stride  backward — Herodotus  had  it,  even 
though  he  may  have  availed  himself  now  and 
again  of  the  novelist's  other  privileges.  Xeno- 
phon  revealed  his  possession  of  it  more  in  his 
story  of  the  retreat  of  the  ten  thousand,  which 
was  fact,  than  in  his  story  of  the  training  of 
Cyrus,  which  was  fiction. 

Of  course  it  will  not  do  to  force  the  classifi- 
cation too  rigorously ;  in  art  the  hard  and  fast 
lines  of  science  are  impossible.  None  the  less 
is  it  amusing  to  call  the  roll  of  English  novel- 
ists, and,  without  insisting  on  an  inexorable 
division  of  the  sheep  from  the  goats,  to  try 
and  see  which  of  them  had  this  gift,  and 
which  of  them  had  to  make  up  for  a  defi- 
ciency of  it  by  an  abundance  in  other  direc- 
tions.    Defoe,  for  instance,  like  Le  Sage,  was 


232  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

a  story-teller  above  all  things;  he  had  this 
precious  faculty  in  the  highest  degree,  and 
perhaps  he  had  little  else.  Swift  had  it  in 
an  equally  full  proportion,  and  he  had  many 
other  things  besides;  indeed,  the  final  proof 
of  Swift's  possession  of  this  gift,  were  any 
needed,  might  be  found  in  the  fact  that  owing 
to  it  his  bitter  satire  of  his  contemporaries, 
his  misanthropic  and  malignant  attack  on 
humanity  at  large  and  for  all  time,  survives 
now  as  a  classic  of  childhood,  and  that  the 
boys  and  girls  of  America  in  the  nineteenth 
century  read  the  travels  of  Lemuel  Gulliver 
as  innocently  as  they  read  the  adventures  of 
Robinson  Crusoe,  with  no  suspicion  that  be- 
neath the  surface  of  the  entrancing  story  there 
lies  an  evil  allegory.  This  is  a  stroke  of  the 
irony  of  fate  which  Swift  himself  would  appre- 
ciate. 

Of  the  three  great  English  novelists  of  the 
eighteenth  century  perhaps  Smollett  had  the 
most  of  this  faculty,  and  Richardson  the  least, 
although  Fielding  had  a  richer  nature  than 
either  of  the  others,  and  a  finer  art,  and  there- 
fore he  got  the  utmost  out  of  his  having. 
Goldsmith's  one  attempt  at  fiction  is  engag- 
ingly artless  and  continually  interesting ;  Gold- 
smith,  like    Irving,   who    resembled   him    in 


THE   GIFT  OF  STORY-TELLING  233 

many  other  respects  also,  had  his  full  share  of 
this  native  faculty,  though  he  did  not  culti- 
vate it  as  carefully  as  Irving  did.  In  like 
manner  Cooper  was  a  more  conscientious 
workman  than  Scott,  and  he  put  his  frame- 
work together  better,  inferior  as  the  American 
romancer  was  to  the  Scottish  master  in  rich- 
ness of  humor  and  in  insight  into  human  char- 
acter. 

Of  the  three  great  British  novelists  of  the 
nineteenth  century  Dickens  was  the  only  one 
who  was  a  true  story-teller,  having  a  far  larger 
share  of  the  native  gift  even  than  Thackeray, 
while  George  Eliot  had  less  of  it  than  almost 
any  other  of  those  who  have  become  famous 
as  writers  of  fiction.  Dickens  was  a  man  of 
limited  culture  and  of  narrow  intelligence — 
as  his  *  Pictures  from  Italy '  proves,  and  his 
*  American  Notes  * — and  he  had  absurd  artistic 
ideals;  but  his  was  the  faculty  of  telling  a 
tale  so  that  we  cannot  choose  but  hear. 
Thackeray,  a  more  accomplished  craftsman, 
was  often  a  more  careless  artificer;  he  had 
a  far  finer  intelligence  than  Dickens,  and  a 
deeper  nature;  but  merely  as  a  story-teller 
Dickens  seems  to  me  to  be  his  superior. 

George  Eliot  (like  Tolstoi,  another  great 
writer  who    uses   fiction   as   a   medium    for 


234  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

morality)  strikes  me  always  as  not  naturally  a 
teller  of  tales,  like  Swift,  for  instance,  and 
Goldsmith.  In  reading  *  Adam  Bede '  and 
'  Middlemarch,'  as  in  reading  '  Anna  Kar^nina,' 
we  have  a  constant  sense  of  effort,  as  though  the 
authors  were  struggling  with  a  consciousness 
that  story-telling  was  not  that  for  which  they 
were  born.  That  George  Eliot  and  Tolstoi" 
were  not  wholly  devoid  of  the  requisite  endow- 
ment is  evident  from  these  books  and  their 
fellows ;  but  the  permanent  value  of  George 
Eliot's  writings  and  of  Tolstoi's  is  not  to  be 
sought  in  their  stories  considered  merely  as 
stories.  And  if  it  were  not  that  the  '  Sorrows 
of  Werther '  had  met  with  instant  acceptance 
all  over  Europe,  I  should  venture  to  suggest 
that,  great  as  Goethe  was,  his  gift  of  story- 
telling was  singularly  small.  There  is  nothing 
easy  or  spontaneous  about  '  Wilhelm  Meister,* 
as  it  is  an  effort  of  the  intellect  rather  than  a 
story.  One  might  call  it  the  first  tendenz- 
ronian — the  first  novel-with-a-purpose — if  one 
could  make  out  clearly  what  its  purpose  was. 
Certainly  one  can  see  in  'Wilhelm  Meister' 
the  ancestor  of  '  Daniel  Deronda '  and  of 
'  Robert  Elsmere  '  and  of  '  John  Ward,  Preach- 
er'—  just  as  one  can  call  Miss  Austen  the 
maiden  grandmother  of  Mr.  Howells.     It  is 


THE  GIFT  OF   STORY-TELLING  235 

to  be  noted  that  Goethe,  keen-sighted  toward 
all  things,  saw  himself  also  with  clear  eyes. 
He  confessed  to  Eckermann  that  his  tendency 
towards  the  practice  of  the  plastic  arts  had 
been  an  error,  since  he  had  no  natural  dis- 
position towards  them. 

(1894.) 


II.-CERVANTES,  ZOLA,  KIPLING  AND  CO. 

M.  Anatole  France,  one  of  the  most 
discriminating  and  inconsequent  of  essayists, 
has  suggested  that  criticism  at  its  best  is  lit- 
tle more  than  a  recital  of  the  adventures  of 
the  critic's  mind  in  contact  with  masterpieces. 
Perhaps  one  reason  why  criticism  is  so  infre- 
quently at  its  best  is  that  the  critic's  mind  is 
in  contact  with  masterpieces  less  often  than  it 
might  be.  It  is  with  the  writings  of  his  con- 
temporaries that  the  critic  has  to  deal  for  the 
most  part ;  and  how  few  of  any  man's  con- 
temporaries are  masters !  It  is  only  by  return- 
ing resolutely  again  and  again  to  the  master- 
pieces of  the  past  that  a  critic  is  able  to  sustain 
his  standard  and  to  prevent  his  taste  from  sink- 
ing to  the  level  of  the  average  of  contempo- 
rary writing. 

And  this  return,  always  its  own  reward,  is 
not  without  its  own  surprises.  Either  the 
accepted  work  is  worthy  of  its  high  repute — 
and  then  there  is  the  pleasure  of  expounding 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,   KIPLING   AND   CO.  237 

it  afresh  to  a  new  generation  and  of  showing 
its  fitness  to  modern  conditions  despite  its  age 
— or  else  it  is  unworthy  and  lacks  true  dura- 
bility— and  then  there  is  the  sad  duty  of  ex- 
plaining how  it  deserved  its  fame  once,  and 
why  it  is  now  outworn.  To  one  critic  it  hap- 
pened one  summer  to  be  reading  *  Don  Quix- 
ote '  (in  Mr.  Ormsby's  nervous  and  satisfactory 
translation),  when  he  received,  by  the  same 
post,  the  'Debacle'  of  M.  Emile  Zola,  and 
the  '  Naulahka '  of  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling  and 
the  late  Wolcott  Balestier ;  and  when  he  had 
made  an  end  of  the  perusal  of  these  three 
books — the  novel  of  the  Spaniard,  the  novel 
of  the  Frenchman,  and  the  novel  of  the  British 
subject  and  the  American  citizen — it  occurred 
to  him  that  he  had  in  them  material  for  a  litera- 
ry comparison  not  without  a  certain  piquancy. 
To  criticise  these  three  books  adequately  would 
permit  the  writing  of  the  history  of  fiction 
during  the  past  three  centuries ;  it  would  au- 
thorize a  thorough  discussion  of  the  princi- 
ples of  the  novelist's  art,  as  these  have  been 
developed  by  the  many  mighty  story-tellers 
who  lived  after  Cervantes  and  before  M.  Zola. 
For  a  siege  as  formidable  as  this  I  have  not 
the  critical  apparatus,  even  if  I  had  the  desire. 
The  most  that  I  can  do  here  is  to  set  down 


238  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

honestly  and  frankly  a  few  of  my  impressions 
as  I  read  in  turn  these  three  novels,  strangely 
consorted  and  sharply  contrasting.  To  sum 
up  the  merits  of  M.  Zola's  book  is  easy ;  and 
it  is  not  hard  to  form  and  to  formulate  an 
opinion  about  the  Indo-American  tale  of  the 
two  young  collaborators ;  but  the  great  work 
of  Cervantes  is  not  so  lightly  disposed  of. 
The  danger  of  any  effort  to  record  the  advent- 
ures of  the  critic's  mind  in  contact  with  a 
masterpiece  like  *  Don  Quixote  '  is  that  it  is 
exceedingly  difficult  for  the  critic  to  be  frank 
with  himself  or  honest  with  his  readers.  His 
mind  does  not  come  squarely  in  contact  with 
the  masterpiece  ;  it  is  warded  off  by  the  cloud 
of  commentators  with  whom  every  masterpiece 
is  encompassed  about.  He  can  read  only 
through  the  spectacles  of  the  countless  critics 
who  have  preceded  him.  He  knows  what  he 
ought  to  think  about  '  Don  Quixote/  and 
this  makes  it  almost  impossible  for  him  to 
think  for  himself  as  he  ought. 

For  the  critic  in  search  of  mental  advent- 
ures, it  is  a  safeguard  to  have  a  hearty  distrust 
of  philosophic  criticism,  so-called — to  have  a 
profound  disbelief  in  the  allegorical  interpre- 
tation of  simple  stories.  Cervantes  was  like 
all  the  other  great  makers  of  fiction  in  that 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,  KIPLING  AND   CO.  239 

he  wrote  first  to  amuse  himself  and  to  relieve 
himself,  and  only  secondarily  to  amuse  his 
readers,  to  move  them,  to  instruct  them  even. 
"  There  is  no  mighty  purpose  in  this  book," 
is  a  proper  motto  for  the  title-page  of  most  of 
the  masterpieces  in  which  philosophical  criti- 
cism sees  a  myriad  of  mighty  purposes,  and 
which  were  written  easily  and  carelessly  and 
with  no  intention  of  creating  a  masterpiece, 
and  with  scarcely  a  thought  of  the  message 
which  the  world  has  since  deciphered  between 
the  lines.  "  He  builded  better  than  he  knew  " 
is  true  of  most  great  writers  ;  perhaps  it  is  not 
wholly  true  of  Dante  and  of  Milton,  who  were 
conscious  artists  always,  and  careful ;  but  it  is 
absolutely  true  of  Shakespeare  and  of  Cer- 
vantes. In  their  pages  we  find  many  a  moral 
which  would  surprise  them ;  and  into  their 
words  we  are  forever  reading  meanings  of  our 
own  of  which  they  had  never  a  suspicion. 
That  *  Hamlet '  and  *  Don  Quixote  *  yield 
up  to  us  to-day  meanings  and  morals  their 
straightforward  authors  never  intended,  is  per- 
haps the  best  possible  evidence  that  '  Hamlet' 
and  *  Don  Quixote  *  are  masterpieces.  The 
work  of  art  which  has  only  the  meaning  and 
the  moral  its  maker  intended,  is  likely  to  be 
thin  and  barren. 


240  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

The  author  of  *  Hamlet '  was  like  his  close 
contemporary,  the  author  of  ^  Don  Quixote,' 
in  that  he  thought  less  apparently  of  the  great 
work  which  has  survived  in  the  affections  of 
the  world  for  two  centuries  and  a  half  than 
he  thought  of  his  other  writings,  now  recalled 
chiefly  because  they  are  due  to  the  pen  which 
gave  us  also  the  masterpieces.  Obviously, 
Cervantes  did  not  read  the  proof  of  *  Don 
Quixote,'  the  first  editions  of  which  abound  in 
printer's  errors  almost  as  many  and  as  serious 
as  those  which  mar  the  first  folio  of  Shake- 
speare. It  would  be  easy  to  maintain  the  as- 
sertion that  Cervantes  set  as  little  store  by 
*  Don  Quixote  *  as  Shakespeare  did  by  '  Ham- 
let '  and  its  fellows,  the  great  Spaniard  esteem- 
ing more  highly  his  plays  and  his  poems,  just 
as  Shakespeare  seems  to  have  cherished  rather 
his  poetry  than  his  plays,  each  man  holding 
lightly  that  which  he  had  wrought  most  read- 
ily and  with  least  effort. 

Indeed,  the  carelessness  with  which  Cervantes 
has  treated  his  masterpiece  is  one  of  the  first 
things  to  strike  a  critic  who  reads  the  seven- 
teenth-century story  with  nineteenth-century 
fastidiousness.  Conscious  of  the  temerity  of 
my  opinion,  and  aware  of  the  awful  fate  which 
may  befall  me  for  declaring  it,  I  venture  to 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,   KIPLING   AND   CO.  24 1 

suggest  that  the  art  of  fiction  is  a  finer  art  to- 
day than  it  was  when  *Don  Quixote '  was  writ- 
ten. In  the  whole  history  of  story-telling  there 
is  no  greater  name  than  the  name  of  Cervantes ; 
but  it  would  be  a  painful  reflection  on  progress 
if  the  efforts  of  successive  generations  of  nov- 
elists— however  inferior  to  him  any  one  of 
these  might  be — had  not  put  the  art  forward. 
The  writers  of  fiction  nowadays  are  scrupu- 
lous where  Cervantes  was  reckless ;  they  take 
thought  where  he  gave  none.  Merely  in  the 
mechanism  of  plot,  in  the  joinery  of  incident, 
in  the  craftsmanship  of  story- telling,  *  Don 
Quixote '  is  indisputably  less  skilful  than  M. 
Zola's  '  Debacle,'  or  the  Kipling-Balestier '  Nau- 
lahka ' — however  inferior  these  may  be  in  more 
vital  points. 

Consider  for  a  moment  the  awkward  pre- 
tence of  a  translation  from  the  manuscript  of 
the  Moor,  Hamet  Benengeli,  as  needless  as  it 
is  ill-sustained.  Consider  the  frank  artlessness 
of  the  narrative,  with  its  irrelevant  tales  in- 
jected into  the  manuscript  merely  because 
Cervantes  happened  to  have  them  on  hand. 
Consider  the  many  anachronisms  and  incon- 
sistencies which  Cervantes  troubled  himself 
about  quite  as  little  as  Shakespeare  thought 
or  cared  whether  or  not  Bohemia  was  a  desert 


242  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

country  by  the  sea.  Consider  the  extraordi- 
nary series  of  coincidences  which  brought  to- 
gether at  the  inn  four  marvellously  beautiful 
women,  when  the  captive  met  his  brother  and 
Cardenio  recovered  Luscinda,  all  of  which  is 
improbable  to  the  vanishing-point,  and  all  of 
which,  worse  yet,  has  nothing  whatever  to  do 
with  the  true  subject  of  the  story.  Consider- 
ing all  these  slovenlinesses,  it  is  impossible  not 
to  wonder  whether  the  art  of  fiction  did  not 
retrograde  with  Cervantes,  for  both  Boccaccio 
and  Chaucer  had  attained  vigor  and  supple- 
ness in  narrative;  their  tales  were  naif,  no 
doubt,  and  direct,  but  they  were  always  art- 
fully composed  and  presented.  To  this  day 
the  *  Decameron  '  and  the  '  Canterbury  Tales ' 
are  models  of  simple  story-telling.  Great  as 
are  his  other  qualities,  Cervantes,  merely  as  a 
teller  of  tales,  is  as  inferior  to  Boccaccio  and  to 
Chaucer  as  he  is  superior  to  Rabelais. 

It  is  in  its  humanity,  in  its  presentation  of 
men  and  women,  in  its  character  -  drawing,  as 
the  modern  phrase  is,  that  the  story  of  Cer- 
vantes excels  all  the  stories  of  Boccaccio,  of 
Chaucer,  and  of  Rabelais.  Alongside  the  gi- 
gantic figure  of  the  Knight  of  La  Mancha, 
what  are  the  characters  in  the  brilliant  little 
comedies  of   Chaucer  and  of   Boccaccio  but 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,   KIPLING   AND   CO.  243 

thumb-nail  sketches?  What  are  Gargantua 
and  Panurge  but  broad  caricatures  when 
compared  with  the  delicately  limned  Don 
Quixote?  Where,  before,  had  any  one  put 
into  fiction  so  much  of  our  everyday  humanity? 
And  what,  after  all,  do  we  seek  in  a  novel,  if 
it  is  not  human  nature?  To  catch  mankind  in 
the  act,  as  it  were ;  to  surprise  the  secrets  of 
character  and  to  show  its  springs ;  to  get  into 
literature  the  very  trick  of  life  itself ;  to  dis- 
play the  variety  of  human  existence,  its  rich- 
ness, its  breadth,  its  intensity ;  to  do  these 
things  with  unforced  humor,  with  unfailing 
good-humor,  with  good-will  towards  all  men, 
with  tolerance,  with  benignity,  with  loving 
kindness — this  is  what  no  writer  of  fiction  had 
done  before  Cervantes  wrote  *  Don  Quixote,* 
and  this  is  what  no  writer  of  fiction  has  ever 
done  better  than  Cervantes  did  it  when  he 
wrote  *  Don  Quixote.* 

Chaucer  is  shrewd  and  kindly  at  once,  but 
even  he  lacks  the  commingled  benevolence  and 
worldly  wisdom  of  Cervantes.  The  characters 
of  the  '  Canterbury  Tales '  have  a  sharper  out- 
line than  the  more  softly  rounded  figures  with 
whom  Don  Quixote  is  associated.  Chaucer 
had  a  full  share  of  the  milk  of  human  kind- 
ness, but  there  is  the  very  cream  of  it  in  Cer- 


244 


ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 


vantes.  Perhaps  there  is  no  better  test  of  the 
greatness  of  a  humorist  than  this — that  his 
humor  has  no  curdHng  acidity.  It  is  easy  to 
amuse  when  there  is  a  willingness  to  wound 
wantonly ;  and  Swift,  though  he  may  laugh 
and  shake  in  Rabelais'  easy-chair,  does  not  fill 
that  huge  throne,  because  he  has  the  pettiness 
of  brutality.  *  Gulliver '  is  inferior  to  '  Gar- 
gantua '  in  that  the  author  of  the  former  hated 
humanity,  while  the  author  of  the  latter  loved 
his  fellow-man,  and  took  life  easily  and  was 
happy. 

Cervantes  was  not  a  merry  man,  and  he  had 
a  hard  life,  and  perhaps  he  wrote  his  great 
book  in  prison ;  but  there  is  no  discontent  in 
*  Don  Quixote.'  There  is  a  wholesome  phi- 
losophy in  it  and  a  willingness  to  make  the 
best  of  the  world,  a  world  which  is  not  so  bad, 
after  all.  *  Don  Quixote'  is  a  very  long  book, 
not  so  long  as  '  Amadis  of  Gaul,*  or  as  the 
romances  of  Mademoiselle  de  Scud^ry,  or  as 
the  '  Three  Musketeers '  with  its  tail  of  sequels, 
but  longer  even  than  *  Daniel  Deronda '  and 
than  *  Robert  Elsmere';  it  is  very  long  and 
it  is  crowded  with  characters,  but  among  all 
these  people  there  is  no  one  man  or  woman 
whom  the  reader  hates ;  there  is  no  one  whom 
the  author  despises  or  insults.     Cervantes  is 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,  KIPLING  AND   CO.  245 

not  severe  with  the  children  of  his  brain ;  he 
loves  them  all ;  he  treats  them  all  with  the 
toleration  which  comes  of  perfect  understand- 
ing. Here,  indeed,  is  the  quality  in  which 
he  is  most  modern,  in  which  he  is  still  unsur- 
passable. Fielding  caught  it  from  him ;  and 
Thackeray,  who  borrowed  so  many  things 
from  Fielding  and  so  much,  did  not  take  over 
this  also,  or  he  could  never  have  pursued  and 
run  down  and  harried  Becky  Sharp  as  he 
thought  fit  to  do. 

Just  as  Fielding  began  'Joseph  Andrews' 
merely  to  guy  Richardson's  virtuous  '  Pamela,' 
and  just  as  he  ended  by  falling  in  love  with  his 
own  handiwork  and  by  giving  us  the  exquisite 
portrait  of  Parson  Adams,  so  Cervantes,  intend- 
ing at  first  little  more  than  to  break  a  lance 
with  the  knights  of  romance,  came  to  respect 
his  own  work  more  and  more,  and  to  treat 
Don  Quixote  with  increasing  courtesy.  Much 
of  the  first  part  is  horse-play,  fun  of  the  most 
robust  sort.  The  humor  of  physical  misad- 
venture is  rarely  refined,  and  it  takes  a  stout 
stomach  to  relish  some  of  Don  Quixote's  ear- 
lier misfortunes.  Even  in  the  second  part, 
the  practical  joke  of  the  belled  cats  may  fairly 
be  called  cruel,  and  it  is  altogether  unworthy 
of  the  hero.     Perhaps  this  is  nineteenth-cen- 


246  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

tury  hypercriticism,  but  Cervantes  is  to  blame 
if  he  has  presented  to  us  a  character  so  lovable 
that  we  revolt  when  any  one  takes  an  unfair 
advantage  of  Don  Quixote. 

We  do  not  resent  the  indignities  which  be- 
fall Sancho,  for  he  has  a  tough  hide  and  a 
stout  heart  and  a  mouth  full  of  proverbs  for 
his  own  consolation.  Yet,  in  his  way,  the 
worthy  squire  is  as  lovable  as  the  honorable 
knight  he  served.  Just  as  Sam  Weller  (who 
made  the  success  of  the  '  Pickwick  Papers ') 
was  an  afterthought,  so  was  Sancho,  who  owed 
his  being  apparently  to  the  chance  remark  of 
the  Landlord,  that  a  knight  should  be  attended 
by  a  squire.  Nothing  reveals  the  genius  of 
Cervantes  more  plainly  than  the  development 
of  Sancho  Panza,  who  was  at  first  only  a  clown, 
nothing  but  a  droll,  a  variant  of  the  gracioso 
or  low  comedian  accompanying  the  hero  of 
every  Spanish  comedy.  By  degrees  he  is  ele- 
vated from  a  mere  mask  into  an  actual  man, 
the  mouthpiece  of  our  common  humanity. 
The  lofty  Knight  of  La  Mancha,  with  his  im- 
possible aspirations,  may  be  taken  as  a  person- 
ification of  the  soul,  while  Sancho  is  the  body 
— of  the  earth,  earthy,  and  having  his  feet  on 
the  ground  firmly.  "  There  is  a  moral  in  '  Don 
Quixote,*  "  said  Lowell,  *'  and  a  very  profound 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,   KIPLING   AND   CO.  247 

one,  whether  Cervantes  consciously  put  it  there 
or  not,  and  it  is  this :  That  whoever  quarrels 
with  the  nature  of  things,  wittingly  or  unwit- 
tingly, is  certain  to  get  the  worst  of  it."  San- 
cho  had  never  a  quarrel  with  the  nature  of 
things. 

Lowell  also  reminded  us  that  "  Cervantes  is 
the  father  of  the  modern  novel,  in  so  far  as  it 
has  become  a  study  and  delineation  of  char- 
acter, instead  of  being  a  narrative  seeking  to 
interest  by  situation  and  incident."  *  Don 
Quixote  *  is  one  of  the  most  original  of  stories ; 
it  had  no  predecessors  of  its  kind,  and  it 
evolved  itself  by  the  spontaneous  generation 
of  genius.  But  its  posterity  is  as  ample  as  its 
ancestry  was  meagre.  When  we  see  Fielding's 
Parson  Adams,  or  Goldsmith's  Dr.  Primrose, 
or  Scott's  Antiquary,  we  see  children  of  Don 
Quixote.  When  we  follow  Mr.  Pickwick  in 
his  foolish  wanderings,  when  we  listen  to  Tar- 
tarin  of  Tarascon  telling  of  the  lions  he  has 
slain,  when  we  hear  Col.  Carter  of  Cartersville 
urging  the  desire  of  the  Garden  Spot  of  Vir- 
ginia for  an  outlet  to  the  sea,  we  have  before 
us  the  progeny  of  the  Knight  of  the  Sorrow- 
ful Countenance.  The  make-believe  of  Tom 
Sawyer  in  trying  to  get  Jim  out  of  prison  in 
full  accordance   with   the   authorities   recalls 


248  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Don  Quixote's  going  mad  in  imitation  of  Or- 
lando ;  and  in  the  pages  of  an  earlier  Amer- 
ican humorist  than  Mark  Twain,  in  Irving's 
'  Knickerbocker,*  there  is  more  than  a  hint  of 
the  manner  of  Cervantes.  As  Lowell  puts  it 
sharply,  "the  pedigrees  of  books  are  as  inter- 
esting and  instructive  as  those  of  men." 

If  Cervantes  was  the  father  of  the  modern 
novel,  we  may  wonder  what  he  would  think 
of  some  of  his  great -great -grandchildren. 
What,  for  example,  would  be  his  opinion  of 
the  '  Naulahka,'  written  by  a  Londoner  who 
had  been  East  and  by  a  New-Yorker  who  had 
been  West.  Cervantes  grew  to  manhood  with 
the  sons  of  the  Conquistadores,  with  the  men 
of  iron  who  had  won  for  Spain  the  golden 
lands  of  Mexico  and  Peru  ;  would  he  have 
foregathered  with  the  Argonauts  of  Forty- 
nine?  A  scant  half-century  before  his  birth 
the  Portuguese  had  pushed  their  way  around 
Africa  in  search  of  Golconda  and  Cathay ; 
would  he  have  been  interested  by  this  story  of 
the  West  and  the  East  ? 

Of  one  thing,  indeed,  we  may  fairly  be  cer- 
tain— that  Cervantes  would  not  have  been  at 
all  surprised  by  the  manner  of  the  '  Naulahka,* 
for  it  is  a  tale  of  a  kind  he  was  abundantly 
familiar  with.     It  is  a  story  of  a  sort  older  by 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,  KIPLING   AND   CO.  249 

far  than  *  Don  Quixote';  it  is  a  story,  in  fact, 
of  the  sort  that  '  Don  Quixote '  was  written 
to  satirize.  In  the  new  tale  we  have  new 
dresses,  of  course,  and  new  scenery  and  new 
properties,  but  the  tale  itself  is  the  old,  old 
story  of  the  hero  in  search  of  adventures;  it 
is  the  tale  of  the  hero  always  on  the  brink  of 
death,  but  bearing  a  charmed  life ;  it  is  the 
tale  of  the  hero  skilled  in  all  manner  of  sports, 
expert  with  all  manner  of  weapons,  fertile  in 
resource  and  prompt  in  decision ;  it  is  the 
tale,  in  short,  of  the  bravura  hero  of  concert- 
pitch  romance.  What  is  Tarvin  of  Topaz 
but  Amadis  of  Gaul?  What  is  the  Crichton 
of  Colorado  but  Palmerin  of  England,  with  all 
the  modern  improvements  ?  What  is  he  but 
Belianis  of  Greece  brought  down  to  date  ? 

The  death-dealing  and  unkillable  Tarvin  may 
also  be  called  a  Yankee  D'Artagnan.  Like 
the  Gascon  hero,  he  goes  in  search  of  jewels 
of  great  price ;  but  he  is  a  nobler  hero  even 
than  Dumas's,  for  he  is  alone,  while  the  three 
musketeers  were  always  four.  Tarvin,  indeed, 
is  the  very  acme  of  heroes,  than  which  there 
can  be  no  man  more  accomplished  and  ver- 
satile—  not  even  Mr.  Barnes  of  New  York, 
or  Mr.  Potter  of  Texas.  He  is  a  real-estate 
boomer    and    an    engineer;   he   has   been   a 


250  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

broncho-breaker  and  a  telegraph  operator ;  he 
is  a  dead  shot  with  a  revolver,  hitting  a  half- 
dollar  spun  in  the  air  while  keeping  an  easy 
seat  on  a  bucking  horse. 

The  main  adventure  in  which  the  heroic 
Tarvin  is  engaged  is  simply  childish ;  the 
word  need  not  be  taken  as  a  reproach  —  I 
merely  mean  that  it  is  a  thing  to  be  told  to 
amuse  children.  It  is  what  the  French  call 
a  conte  h  dormir  debout.  Like  most  of  the 
romantic  fiction  of  this  late  day,  the  '  Nau- 
lahka'  reveals  rather  invention  than  imagi- 
nation. It  is  ingeniously  constructed ;  it  has 
not  a  little  of  the  cleverness  its  authors  have 
shown  in  other  work;  it  has  passages  of 
beauty ;  it  gives  the  reader  moments  of  ex- 
citement; it  is  lighted  now  and  again  by 
flashes  of  insight ;  and,  as  a  whole,  it  is  a 
hollow  disappointment. 

And  the  reason  is  not  far  to  seek.  It  is  be- 
cause romance  of  this  sort  is  not  what  either 
of  the  collaborators  did  best.  It  is  because 
neither  Mr.  Kipling  nor  his  brother-in-law 
could  put  his  whole  strength  into  so  hopeless  a 
make-believe.  Balestier  was  a  realist ;  beyond 
all  question,  the  man  who  wrote  the  little  tale 
of  '  Reffey '  was  a  realist,  with  the  imagination 
a  true  realist  needs  more  than  the  ordinary 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,  KIPLING   AND   CO.  25 1 

romanticist.  Mr.  Kipling  is  sometimes  a  real- 
ist and  sometimes  an  idealist ;  he  is  a  humor- 
ist often,  and,  when  he  is  at  his  best,  he  is  a 
poet  also.  Why  did  two  such  men  join  forces 
in  a  vain  effort  to  pump  the  breath  of  life  into 
a  disestablished  idol? 

Of  course,  the  *  Naulahka '  is  not  without 
touches  of  character  worthy  of  the  author  of 
the  *  Courting  of  Dinah  Shadd,'  although 
there  is  little  or  nothing  in  it  really  worthy  of 
the  author  of  the  *  Gate  of  a  Hundred  Sor- 
rows '  and  of  *  Without  Benefit  of  Clergy.* 
The  gypsy  queen  is  a  fine  conception,  and  her 
son  is  a  live  child,  and  the  heir-apparent  is 
also  a  human  being;  all  of  these  ring  true. 
And  here  and  there  in  the  Indian  chapters  of 
the  story  are  other  evidences  of  Mr.  Kipling's 
robust  talent,  of  his  knack  of  the  unhackneyed 
epithet,  of  his  power  of  revealing  character  as 
by  a  lightning  flash.  Perhaps  it  is  due  to  the 
milder  influence  of  his  collaborator  that  there 
is  in  the  '  Naulahka '  less  of  the  bluster,  of  the 
swagger,  of  the  precocious  knowingness  which 
made  some  of  the  *  Plain  Tales  from  the  Hills ' 
offensive  in  the  eyes  of  those  who  do  not  like 
a  style  made  up  wholly  of  the  primary  colors. 
There  is  less  also  of  the  violence  which  was 
the  key-note  of  the  '  Light  that  Failed ' ;  and 


252  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

Mr.  Kipling  is  no  longer  looking  for  effects, 
immediate,  obvious,  and  barbaric — like  the  ar- 
chitecture of  the  India  his  stories  give  us  so 
strong  a  desire  not  to  visit. 

While  the  '  Naulahka '  is,  as  I  have  said, 
the  kind  of  a  story  which  was  popular  a  full 
century  before  *  Don  Quixote  *  was  written, 
*  La  Debacle  *  is  the  kind  of  a  story  which 
has  come  into  fashion  two  and  a  half  centuries 
after  '  Don  Quixote  *  first  appeared.  If  Cer- 
vantes would  find  himself  at  home  in  reading 
the  adventures  of  Tarvin  of  Topaz,  what  would 
he  think  of  M.  Zola's  solidly  built  and  broadly 
painted  panorama  of  the  Second  Empire's 
catastrophe?  Perhaps,  as  an  old  soldier,  as 
one  who  had  fought  at  Lepanto,  Cervantes 
would  be  most  impressed  by  the  sustained 
force  of  M.  Zola's  battle-pieces,  than  which 
there  are  none  more  vigorous  in  all  fiction. 
Not  Stendhal's  Waterloo,  not  Victor  Hugo's, 
not  Thackeray's — done  by  indirection,  but  all 
the  more  moving  for  that  —  not  Tolstoi's 
Sebastopol  even,  gives  the  reader  so  vivid  a 
realization  of  the  waste  of  war,  of  its  destruc- 
tiveness,  of  the  weariness  of  it  and  the  hunger, 
of  the  horrors  of  every  kind  which  are  inevitable 
and  necessary,  and  which  M.  Zola  makes  us  feel 
more  keenly  than  Callot  could  or  Verestchagin. 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,   KIPLING  AND    CO.  253 

There  is  in  *  La  Debacle  *  little  of  the  realism 
M.  Zola  has  praised,  little  or  nothing  of  the 
naturalism  he  has  proclaimed ;  there  is  an 
epic  simplicity,  a  mighty  movement,  a  Cyclo- 
pean architecture  not  to  be  found  in  the 
work  of  any  other  novelist  in  all  the  luminous 
list  of  names  since  Cervantes.  We  have  here 
no  miniature  portraits  of  dandy  soldiers ;  we 
have  no  mere  genre  -  painting  of  troops  in 
picturesque  attitudes ;  we  have  rather  a  series 
of  masterly  frescoes,  brushed  in  boldly  with 
a  broad  sweep  of  the  arm,  without  hesitancy, 
with  the  consciousness  of  strength.  M.  Zola 
has  Taine's  faculty  of  accumulating  typical 
details ;  he  has  the  same  power  of  handling 
immense  masses  of  facts  and  of  compelling 
each  into  its  proper  place ;  and  never  has  he 
used  this  faculty  and  this  power  to  better 
advantage  than  in  '  La  Debacle  * — not  even  in 
*  Germinal.' 

The  story  is  far  too  long;  it  has  two  hun- 
dred pages  too  many  ;  it  is  extended  to  include 
the  last  wild  struggle  of  the  Commune;  it 
grows  wearisome  at  last ;  but  what  a  splendid 
succession  of  pictures  is  presented  to  us  before 
we  feel  the  first  fatigue !  We  are  made  to  see 
the  incredible  mismanagement  of  the  imperial 
army,  due  to  mingled  knavery  and  incompe- 


254  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

tence ;  we  are  shown  the  complete  collapse  of 
the  French  commissariat  and  ordnance  depart- 
ment;  we  are  made  spectators  of  the  moral 
disintegration  of  impending  defeat  as  the 
French  were  shut  in  by  the  inexorable  iron 
ring  of  the  Germans  ;  we  have  brought  before 
us  the  whole  helpless  empire,  from  the  invalid 
monarch  down  to  the  privates  and  the  peasants. 

The  unending  passage  of  the  Prussian  artil- 
lery through  the  village  by  night  at  a  hard 
gallop ;  the  sudden  vision,  in  the  midst  of  the 
battle,  of  a  peasant  ploughing  peacefully,  in  a 
hidden  hollow — repeated  again  when  the  fight 
is  over;  the  execution  of  Weiss  under  the 
eyes  of  his  wife,  after  a  defence  of  his  house, 
which  is  a  realization  in  words  of  the  '  Last 
Cartridge*;  the  ghastly  group  of  the  dead 
Zouaves  carousing ;  the  frantic  charge  of  the 
riderless  horses  across  the  silent  battle  -  field  ; 
the  assassination  of  Goliath  in  the  presence  of 
his  child ;  these  are  things  which  cling  to  the 
memory  obstinately.  These  are  scenes  also 
which  Cervantes  would  appreciate  as  he  would 
appreciate  the  massive  structure  of  *  La  De- 
bacle '  when  compared  with  the  haphazard  inci- 
dents and  the  hesitating  plot  of '  Don  Quixote.' 

What  Cervantes  would  most  miss  in  M. 
Zola's  book  would  be  joyousness  and  humor. 


CERVANTES,  ZOLA,   KIPLING  AND   CO.  255 

M.  Zola  has  no  humor,  either  positive  or  neg- 
ative—  positive  which  breaks  in  upon  the 
seriousness  of  the  reader,  or  negative  which 
prevents  the  author  from  taking  himself  too 
seriously.  M.  Zola  has  little  joy  in  life,  although 
he  has  softened  of  late.  Once  he  saw  all  man- 
kind darkly,  as  though  he  hated  humanity  or 
despised  it ;  and  the  characters  in  his  novels 
were  etched  by  the  acid  of  his  malice.  Now 
he  uses  a  gentler  crayon  and  he  sketches  with 
suaver  outlines  ;  he  is  not  unfair  even  towards 
the  Germans.  There  are  in  *La  Debacle' 
men  and  women  we  can  like — although  there 
is  no  one  to  love  as  we  love  Don  Quixote  and 
Sancho.  Brutal  is  what  M.  Zola  used  to  be, 
brutal  and  dirty.  He  is  not  brutal  now  and 
he  is  less  dirty.  He  is  still  fond  of  foul  words, 
and  there  are  half  a  dozen  of  them  repeated 
again  and  again  in  *  La  Debacle.'  But  as  a 
whole,  the  story  is  surprisingly  clean.  There 
is  nothing  in  it  to  shock  Cervantes  certainly, 
for  he  too  could  be  plain-spoken  at  times — 
quite  as  plain-spoken  as  M.  Zola.  But  what- 
ever his  speech,  however  frank  and  hearty, 
however  exactly  he  reproduces  the  vocabulary 
of  the  common  people,  the  mind  of  Cervantes 
was  always  clean,  pure,  lofty. 
(189a.) 


Ill -THE  PROSE  TALES  OF  M.  FRANCOIS 
CORPSE. 

Like  Moli^re,  like  Boileau,  like  Regnard, 
like  Voltaire,  and  like  Musset,  M.  Frangois 
Copp^e  was  born  in  Paris,  and  more  than  any- 
other  of  the  half-dozen  is  he  a  true  child  of 
the  fair  city  by  the  Seine,  loving  her  more 
ardently,  and  leaving  her  less  willingly.  The 
facts  of  his  simple  and  uneventful  career  have 
been  set  forth  by  his  friend  M.  de  Lescure  in 
'Fran9ois  Coppee  :  I'Homme,  la  Vie  et  TCEu- 
vre  (i 842-1 889).'  From  this  we  learn  that 
the  poet  was  born  in  1842,  that  he  was  the 
youngest  child  of  a  poor  clerk  in  the  War  De- 
partment, that  he  had  three  elder  sisters,  one 
of  whom  survives  still  to  take  care  of  her 
brother,  that  he  spent  most  of  his  struggling 
childhood  in  old  houses  on  the  left  (and 
more  literary)  bank  of  the  Seine,  that  he  was 
not  an  apt  scholar  in  his  youth,  that  he  be- 
gan to  write  verses  very  early  in  his  teens, 
and  that  at  last  his  father  died,  and  he  sue- 


THE    PROSE   TALES   OF    M.   FRANQOIS   COPP^E    257 

ceeded  to  the  modest  position  in  the  War 
Department,  becoming  the  head  of  the  family 
at  twenty-one.  In  time  he  made  acquaintance 
with  other  young  poets,  and  was  admitted 
into  the  "  Parnassians,"  as  they  were  called 
— followers  of  Victor  Hugo,  of  Th^ophile 
Gautier,  of  Theodore  de  Banville,  students  of 
new  and  old  rhythms,  and  seekers  after 
rich  rymes,  as  ardent  in  the  search  as  the  Ar- 
gonauts of  '  Forty-nine.  M.  Copp^e  burned 
every  one  of  his  juvenile  poems,  and  wrote 
many  another  of  more  cunning  workmanship  ; 
and  of  these  newer  poems  two  volumes  were 
published  in  the  next  few  years — *  Le  R^li- 
quaire  '  and  '  Les  Intimites  *  —  but  they  did 
not  sell  two  hundred  copies  all  told. 

Then,  in  1869,  came  the  first  golden  gleam 
of  fortune.  *  Le  Passant,'  a  little  one-act  com- 
edy in  verse,  was  acted  one  night  at  the  Odeon, 
and  the  next  day  the  name  of  Fran9ois  Cop- 
p^e  was  no  longer  unknown  to  any  of  those 
who  care  for  letters.  *  Le  Passant '  is  unde- 
niably artificial,  and  at  bottom  it  is  probably 
forced  in  feeling,  if  not  false ;  but  beyond  all 
question  the  poet  believed  in  it  and  accepted 
its  truth,  and  delighted  in  his  work.  The  sen- 
timent is  charmingly  youthful,  with  a  spring- 
like  freshness,  and  the  versification  is   abso- 


258  ASPECTS    OF    FICTION 

lutely  impeccable.  For  years  M.  Coppee  was 
called  "  the  author  of  *  Le  Passant,'  "  until  he 
came  almost  to  hate  his  first-born.  But  only 
one  of  his  later  plays  has  rivalled  it  in  popular 
acceptance ;  this  is  the  pathetic  '  Luthier  de 
Cremone,'  of  which  there  are  several  adapta- 
tions in  English.  A  third  one-act  play,  *  Le 
Pater/  forbidden  in  Paris  by  the  stage  censors, 
was,  strangely  enough,  brought  out  here  in 
New  York  at  Daly's  Theatre  shortly  after  as 
the  '  Prayer.'  As  a  dramatist,  M.  Coppee  con- 
tinues the  romanticist  tradition,  now  a  little 
outworn  ;  and  his  longer  plays  lack  the  direct- 
ness of  his  later  poems  and  prose  tales.  No 
one  of  them  has  had  more  than  a  merely  hon- 
orable success,  and  no  one  of  them — with  a 
single  exception  only — has  shown  itself  strong 
enough  to  stand  the  perils  of  translation. 

During  the  dark  days  of  1870  and  1871  M. 
Coppee  did  his  duty  in  the  ranks,  like  many 
another  artist  in  letters  and  with  the  brush. 
Of  course,  he  wrote  war  poems,  both  during 
the  fighting  and  after,  neither  better  nor  worse, 
most  of  them,  than  the  war  poems  of  other 
French  poets.  Better  than  any  of  these  mar- 
tial rymes  are  the  *  Gr^ve  des  Forgerons,' 
written  just  before  the  war,  and  'Les  Hum- 
bles/ a  volume  of  verse  written  shortly  after 


THE   PROSE   TALES   OF   M.  FRANgOIS   COPP^E    259 

peace  had  been  restored.  The  *  Gr^ve  des 
Forgerons '  is  a  dramatic  monologue,  in  which 
a  striking  iron-worker  explains  how  it  came 
to  pass  that  he  killed  a  man,  and  why  he  did 
the  deed.  It  suggests  Browning  in  its  min- 
gling of  movement  and  introspection,  but  it  is 
neither  as  rugged  in  form  nor  as  swift  in  ac- 
tion as  the  British  poet  would  have  made  it. 

It  is  in  *  Les  Humbles'  that  there  was  first 
revealed  the  French  poet  with  whom  we  of 
Anglo-Saxon  stock  can  perhaps  feel  ourselves 
most  in  sympathy.  The  note  which  domi- 
nates the  poems  in  that  collection,  and  in  most 
of  M.  Copp^e's  later  volumes  of  verse,  is  less 
seldom  found  in  English  literature  than  in 
French.  This  is  the  note  of  sympathy  with 
the  lowly,  with  the  unsuspected  victims  of 
fate.  It  is  the  note  of  compassion  for  those 
who  struggle  secretly  and  in  ,vain,  for  those 
who  are  borne  down  beneath  the  burdens  of 
commonplace  existence,  for  those  who  have 
never  had  a  chance  in  life.  It  is  the  note 
we  mark  now  and  again,  for  instance,  in  the 
deeper  poems  of  Mr.  Austin  Dobson.  Many 
of  the  foremost  French  authors  of  late  years 
are  mere  mandarins,  writing  exclusively  for 
their  peers ;  they  are  Brahmins,  despising  all 
outside  their  own  high  caste ;  they  are  wholly 


26o  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

without  bowels  of  compassion  for  their  fellow- 
man.  Compare,  for  example,  again,  the  con- 
temptuous and  contemning  attitude  of  Flau- 
bert towards  the  creatures  of  his  own  making, 
whom  he  regards  distantly,  as  though  they 
were  doubtful  insects  under  a  microscope,  and 
the  warmer  tolerance  George  Eliot  shows  even 
for  her  least  worthy  characters. 

M.  Copp^e  is  as  detached  from  his  humble 
heroes  and  heroines  as  any  one  could  wish ; 
he  is  too  profoundly  an  artist  ever  to  intervene 
in  his  own  person  ;  but  he  is  not  chill  and 
inaccessible  in  his  telling  of  their  little  lives, 
made  up  of  a  thousand  banalities  and  lit  by  a 
single  gleam  of  poetry,  not  cast  by  the  glare 
of  a  great  self-sacrifice,  but  falling  from  the 
pure  flame  of  daily  duties  performed  without 
thought  of  self.  '  Les  Humbles'  is  but  a 
gallery  of  pictures  in  the  manner  of  the  little 
masters  of  Holland — a  series  of  portraits  of 
the  down -trodden  in  their  every -day  garb, 
with  that  suggestion  of  their  inner  life  which 
illuminates  every  painting  by  an  artist  of  true 
insight.  In  the  old-fashioned  sense  of  the 
word  there  is  little  "  heroic"  in  '  Les  Humbles;* 
and  there  is  absolutely  nothing  of  the  exag- 
gerated larger-  than  -  life  -  and  -  twice-  as  -  natural 
manner  of  Victor  Hugo,  set  off  with  violent 


THE  PROSE  TALES  OF  M.  FRANQOIS  COPPEE  26 1 

contrasts  and  startling  antitheses.  Instead 
we  have  an  accomplished  poet  telling  us  of  the 
simple  lives  of  the  poor  in  the  simple  speech 
of  the  people.  M.  Copp^e  has  a  homeliness 
of  phrase  not  unlike  that  of  Theocritus,  but 
perhaps  less  consciously  literary. 

Indeed,  nothing  more  clearly  shows  the 
delicacy  of  his  art  than  his  extraordinary  skill 
in  concealing  all  trace  of  artifice,  so  that  a 
most  carefully  constructed  poem  is  seemingly 
spontaneous.  To  most  of  us  French  poetry 
is  rarely  interesting ;  it  is  obviously  artificial ; 
it  strikes  us  as  somewhat  remote  ;  possibly 
from  the  enforced  use  of  words  of  Romance 
origin  (which  therefore  seem  to  us  secondary) 
to  describe  heartfelt  emotion,  expressed  by 
us  in  words  of  Teutonic  stock  (which  are 
therefore  to  us  primary).  Lowell  has  told 
us  that  it  is  only  the  high  polish  of  French 
verse  that  keeps  out  decay.  We  do  not  feel 
this  in  reading  the  best  of  M.  Copp^e's  poetry  ; 
it  seems  to  us  as  natural  an  outgrowth  almost 
as  Heine's  or  Longfellow's.  In  another  essay 
Lowell  says  that  perhaps  the  great  charm  of 
Gray's  *  Elegy  *  is  to  be  found  "  in  its  embody- 
ing that  pensively  stingless  pessimism  which 
comes  with  the  first  gray  hair,  that  vague 
sympathy   with   ourselves  which  is  so  much 


262  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

cheaper  than  sympathy  with  others,  that  placid 
melancholy  which  satisfies  the  general  appe- 
tite for  an  emotion  that  titillates  rather  than 
wounds."  That  M.  Coppee  has  put  into 
French  verse,  unmusical  as  it  is,  the  qualities 
which  Lowell  finds  in  Gray's  *  Elegy  '  is  evi- 
dence that  neither  in  manner  nor  in  matter 
is  he  like  most  French  poets. 

But  this  acceptability  of  his  poetry  to  ears 
attuned  to  more  Teutonic  rhythms  has  not 
been  won  by  any  accidental  dereliction  from 
the  strictest  rule  of  the  Parnassians.  M.  Coppee 
has  besieged  and  captured  the  final  fastnesses 
of  French  metrical  art,  and  his  work  is  com- 
pletely satisfactory  even  to  Banville,  who  be- 
strides his  hobby  of  ''  rich  "  rymes  as  though 
it  were  Pegasus  itself.  M.  Coppee  early  gave 
proof  of  remarkable  skill  at  the  difBcult  game 
of  French  versification,  and  he  still  plays  it 
scientifically,  and  with  great  good  luck.  Of 
late  years  he  has  been  called  upon  frequently 
to  sing  to  order,  to  write  verses  for  a  celebra- 
tion, and  he  has  always  been  as  ready  as  Dr. 
Holmes  was  once  to  lay  a  garland  of  rymes 
on  the  grave  of  a  hero.  The  art  of  writing 
occasional  verse  which  shall  be  worthy  of  the 
occasion  is  not  a  common  gift.  M.  Copp6e 
possesses  it  abundantly,  and  his  many  poems 


THE   PROSE   TALES   OF    M.  FRANQOIS   COPP^E    263 

for  feasts  or  fasts  are  always  appropriate,  ade- 
quate, and  dignified. 

*  Olivier  *  is  M.  Coppee's  most  ambitious 
longer  poem.  But  it  is  not  in  his  longer  poems 
that  he  is  seen  at  his  best.  What  he  does  to 
perfection  is  the  conte  en  vers — the  tale  in  verse. 
The  conte  is  a  form  of  fiction  in  which  the 
French  have  always  delighted,  and  in  which 
they  have  always  excelled,  from  the  days  of 
t\iG  jongleurs  and  the  trouv^res^  past  the  periods 
of  La  Fontaine  and  Voltaire,  down  to  the  pres- 
ent. The  conte  is  a  tale  something  more  than 
a  sketch,  it  may  be,  and  something  less  than  a 
short  story.  In  verse  it  is  at  times  but  a  mere 
rymed  anecdote,  or  it  may  attain  almost  to 
the  direct  swiftness  of  a  ballad.  The  '  Canter- 
bury Tales'  are  contes  most  of  them,  if  not  all, 
and  so  are  some  of  the  *  Tales  of  a  Way-side 
Inn.*  The  free -and  easy  tales  of  Prior  were 
written  in  imitation  of  the  French  conte  en  vers; 
and  that  likewise  was  the  model  of  more  than 
one  of  the  lively  narrative  poems  of  Mr.  Austin 
Dobson. 

No  one  has  succeeded  more  admirably  in  the 
coTtte  en  vers  than  M.  Coppee.  Where  was 
there  ever  anything  better  of  its  kind  than 
'L'Enfant  de  la  Balle*? — that  gentle  portrait 
of  the  infant  phenomenon,  framed  in  a  chain  of 


264  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

occasional  gibes  at  the  sordid  ways  of  theatrical 
managers,  and  at  their  hostility  toward  poetic 
plays.  Where  is  there  anything  of  a  more 
simple  pathos  than  *  L'Epave  '  ? — that  story  of 
a  sailor's  son  whom  the  widowed  mother  vain- 
ly strives  to  keep  from  the  cruel  waves  that 
killed  his  father.  (It  is  worthy  of  a  parenthesis 
that  although  the  ship  M.  Coppee  loves  best  is 
that  which  sails  the  blue  shield  of  the  city  of 
Paris,  he  knows  the  sea  also,  and  he  depicts 
sailors  with  affectionate  fidelity.)  But  whether 
at  the  sea-side  by  chance,  or  more  often  in  the 
streets  of  the  city,  the  poet  seeks  for  the  sub- 
ject of  his  story  some  incident  of  daily  occur- 
rence made  significant  by  his  interpretation  ;  he 
chooses  some  character  commonplace  enough, 
but  made  firmer  by  conflict  with  evil  and  by 
victory  over  self.  Those  whom  he  puts  into 
his  poems  are  still  the  humble,  the  forgotten, 
the  neglected,  the  unknown,  and  it  is  the  feel- 
ings and  the  struggles  of  these  that  he  tells  us, 
with  no  maudlin  sentimentality,  and  with  no 
dead-set  at  our  sensibilities.  The  sub -title 
Mrs.  Stowe  gave  to  '  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin '  would 
serve  to  cover  most  of  M.  Coppee's  contes  either 
in  prose  or  verse ;  they  are  nearly  all  pictures 
of  "life  among  the  lowly."  But  there  is  no 
forcing  of  the  note  in  his  painting  of  poverty 


THE   PROSE   TALES   OF   M.  FRANQOIS   COPP^E     265 

and  labor ;  there  is  no  harsh  juxtaposition  of 
the  blacks  and  the  whites.  The  tone  is  always 
manly  and  wholesome. 

'  La  Marchande  de  Journaux '  and  the  other 
little  masterpieces  of  story-telling  in  verse  are 
unfortunately  untranslatable,  as  are  all  poems 
but  a  lyric  or  two  now  and  then  by  a  happy 
accident.  A  translated  poem  is  a  boiled  straw- 
berry, as  some  one  once  brutally  put  it.  But 
the  tales  which  M.  Coppee  has  written  in  prose 
— a  true  poet's  prose,  nervous,  vigorous,  flex- 
ible, and  firm — these  can  be  Englished  by  tak- 
ing thought  and  time  and  pains,  without  which 
a  translation  is  always  a  betrayal.  Ten  of  these 
tales  have  been  rendered  into  English  by  Mr. 
Learned,  and  the  ten  chosen  for  translation 
are  among  the  best  of  the  twoscore  and  more  of 
M.  Copp^e's  coxites  en  prose.  These  ten  tales 
are  fairly  representative  of  his  range  and  va- 
riety. Compare,  for  example,  the  passion  in 
the  *  Foster-sister  ' — pure,  burning,  and  fatal — - 
with  the  Black  Forest  naivetd  of  the  *  Wooden 
Shoes  of  Little  Wolff.'  Contrast  the  touching 
pathos  of  the  *  Substitute,'  poignant  in  his  mag- 
nificent self-sacrifice,  by  which  the  man  who 
has  conquered  his  shameful  past  goes  back 
willingly  to  the  horrible  life  he  has  fled  from, 
that  he  may  save  from  a  like  degradation  and 


266  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

from  an  inevitable  moral  decay  the  one  friend 
he  has  in  the  world,  all  unworthy  as  this  friend 
is — contrast  this  with  the  story  of  the  gigantic 
deeds  *  My  Friend  Meutrier*  boasts  about  un- 
ceasingly, not  knowing  that  he  has  been  dis- 
covered in  his  little  round  of  daily  domestic 
duties  —  making  the  coffee  of  his  good  old 
mother,  and  taking  her  poodle  out  for  a 
walk. 

Among  these  ten  there  are  tales  of  all  sorts, 
from  the  tragic  adventure  of  '  An  Accident '  to 
the  pendant  portraits  of  the  '  Two  Clowns,'  cut- 
ting in  its  sarcasm,  but  not  bitter ;   from  the 

*  Captain's  Vices,'  which  suggests  at  once 
George  Eliot's  *  Silas  Marner '  and  Mr.  Austin 
Dobson's  *  Tale  of  Polypheme,'  to  the  sombre 
reverie  of  the  poet  *  At  the  Table,'  a  sudden 
and  searching  light  cast  on  the  labor  and  mis- 
ery which  underlie  the  luxury  of  our  complex 
modern  existence.     Like  'At  the  Table,'  the 

*  Dramatic  Funeral '  is  a  picture  more  than  it 
is  a  story ;  it  is  a  marvellous  reproduction  of 
the  factitious  emotion  of  the  good-natured 
stage-folk,  who  are  prone  to  overact  even  their 
own  griefs  and  joys.  The  '  Dramatic  Funeral ' 
seems  to  me  always  as  though  it  might  be  a 
painting  of  M.  Jean  B^raud,  that  most  Parisian 
of  artists,  just  as  certain  stories    of  Maupas- 


THE  PROSE  TALES  OF  M.  FRANQOIS  COPPEE  267 

sant's  inevitably  suggest  the  bold  freedom  of 
M.  Forain's  sketches  in  black  and  white. 

An  ardent  admirer  of  the  author  of  the  stories 
in  the  *  Odd  Number '  has  protested  to  me 
that  M.  Copp6e  is  not  an  etcher  like  Mau- 
passant, but  rather  a  painter  in  water-colors. 
And  why  not  ?  Thus  might  we  call  M.  Alphonse 
Daudet  an  artist  in  pastels,  so  adroitly  does 
he  suggest  the  very  bloom  of  color.  No  doubt 
M.  Coppee's  contes  have  not  the  sharpness  of 
Maupassant's  nor  the  brilliancy  of  M.  Daudet *s. 
But  what  of  it  ?  They  have  qualities  of  their 
own.  They  have  sympathy,  poetry,  and  a 
power  of  suggesting  pictures  not  exceeded,  I 
think,  by  those  of  either  Maupassant  or  M. 
Daudet.  M.  Copp6e's  street  views  in  Paris, 
his  interiors,  his  impressionist  sketches  of  life 
under  the  shadow  of  Notre  Dame,  are  con- 
vincingly successful.  They  are  intensely  to 
be  enjoyed  by  those  of  us  who  take  the  same 
keen  delight  in  the  varied  phases  of  life  in 
New  York.  They  are  not,  to  my  mind,  really 
rivalled  either  by  those  of  Maupassant,  who 
was  a  Norman  by  birth  and  a  nomad  by 
choice,  or  by  those  of  M.  Daudet,  who  is  a 
native  of  Provence,  although  now  for  thirty 
years  a  resident  of  Paris.  M.  Copp^e  is  a 
Parisian  from  his  youth  up,  and  even  in  prose 


268  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

he  is  a  poet.  Perhaps  this  is  why  his  pict- 
ures of  Paris  are  unsurpassable  in  their  felicity 
and  in  their  verity. 

It  may  be  fancy,  but  I  seem  to  see  also  a 
finer  morality  in  M.  Copp^e's  work  than  in 
Maupassant's,  or  in  M.  Daudet's,  or  in  that  of 
almost  any  other  of  the  Parisian  story-tellers 
of  to-day.  In  his  tales  we  breathe  a  purer 
moral  atmosphere,  more  wholesome  and  more 
bracing.  It  is  not  that  M.  Coppee  probably 
thinks  of  ethics  rather  than  esthetics ;  in  this 
respect  his  attitude  is  undoubtedly  that  of  the 
others.  There  is  no  sermon  in  his  song,  or  at 
least  none  for  those  who  will  not  seek  it  for 
themselves  ;  there  is  never  a  hint  of  a  preach- 
ment. But  for  all  that,  I  have  found  in  his 
work  a  trace  of  the  tonic  morality  which  in- 
heres in  Moliere,  for  example — also  a  Parisian 
by  birth — and  in  Rabelais,  too,  despite  his  dis- 
guising grossness.  This  finer  morality  comes 
possibly  from  a  wider  and  a  deeper  survey  of 
the  universe ;  and  it  is  as  different  as  possible 
from  the  morality  which  is  externally  applied, 
and  which  always  punishes  the  villain  in  the 
fifth  act. 

It  is  of  good  augury  for  our  own  letters  that 
the  best  French  fiction  of  to-day  is  getting  it- 
self translated  in  the  United  States,  and  that 


THE  PROSE  TALES  OF  M.  FRANQOIS  COPPEE  269 

the  liking  for  it  is  growing  apace.  Fiction  is 
more  consciously  an  art  in  France  than  any- 
where else,  perhaps  partly  because  the  French 
are  now  foremost  in  nearly  all  forms  of  artistic 
endeavor.  In  the  short  story  especially,  in 
the  tale,  in  the  conte^  their  supremacy  is  incon- 
testable, and  their  skill  is  shown  and  their 
esthetic  instinct  exemplified  partly  in  the 
sense  of  form,  in  the  constructive  method 
which  underlies  the  best  short  stories,  how- 
ever trifling  these  may  appear  to  be,  and  part- 
ly in  the  rigorous  suppression  of  non-essen- 
tials, due  in  a  measure,  it  may  be,  to  the 
example  of  Merim^e.  That  is  an  example 
we  in  America  may  study  to  advantage,  and 
from  the  men  who  are  writing  fiction  in 
France  we  may  gain  much. 
(1890.) 


IV.-THE   SHORT   STORIES   OF   M.   LUDOVIC 
HAL^VY 

To  most  American  readers  of  fiction  I  fan- 
cy that  M.  Ludovic  Halevy  is  known  chiefly, 
if  not  solely,  as  the  author  of  that  most 
charming  of  modern  French  novels,  the  *  Abb^ 
Constantin.'  Some  of  these  readers  may  have 
disliked  this  or  that  novel  of  M.  Zola's  be- 
cause of  its  bad  moral,  and  this  or  that  novel 
of  M.  Ohnet's  because  of  its  bad  taste,  but 
all  of  them  were  delighted  to  discover  in  M. 
Halevy *s  interesting  and  artistic  work  a  story 
written  by  a  French  gentleman  for  young 
ladies.  Here  and  th^re  a  scoffer  might  sneer 
at  the  tale  of  the  old  French  priest  and  the 
young  women  from  Canada  as  innocuous  but 
saccharine ;  but  the  story  of  the  good  Abbe 
Constantin  and  of  his  nephew,  and  of  the  girl 
the  nephew  loved  in  spite  of  her  American 
millions — this  story  had  the  rare  good  fortune 
of  pleasing  at  once  the  broad  public  of  indis- 
criminate readers  of  fiction  and  the  narrower 


THE   SHORT  STORIES  OF  M.  LUDOVIC   HAL^VY    271 

circle  of  real  lovers  of  literature.  Artificial 
the  atmosphere  of  the  tale  might  be,  but  it 
was  with  an  artifice  at  once  delicate  and  de- 
licious ;  and  the  tale  itself  won  its  way  into  the 
hearts  of  the  women  of  America  as  it  had  into 
the  hearts  of  the  women  of  France. 

There  is  even  a  legend — although  how  solid 
a  foundation  it  may  have  in  fact  I  do  not  dare 
to  discuss — there  is  a  legend  that  the  lady- 
superior  of  a  certain  convent  near  Paris  was 
so  fascinated  by  the  *Abbe  Constantin,'  and 
so  thoroughly  convinced  of  the  piety  of  its 
author,  that  she  ordered  all  his  other  works, 
receiving  in  due  season  the  lively  volumes 
wherein  are  recorded  the  sayings  and  doings 
of  Monsieur  and  Madame  Cardinal,  and  of 
the  two  lovely  daughters  of  Monsieur  and 
Madame  Cardinal.  To  note  that  these  very 
amusing  studies  of  certain  aspects  of  life  in 
a  modern  capital  originally  appeared  in  that 
extraordinary  journal  La  Vie  Parisienne — now 
sadly  degenerate — is  enough  to  indicate  that 
they  are  not  precisely  what  the  good  lady- 
superior  expected  to  receive.  We  may  not 
say  that  the  *  Famille  Cardinal  *  is  one  of  the 
books  every  gentleman's  library  should  be 
without ;  but  to  appreciate  its  value  requires 
a  far  different  knowledge  of  the  world  and  of 


272  ASPECTS  OF   FICTION 

its  wickedness  than  is  needed  to  understand 
the  *  Abbe  Constantin.' 

Yet  the  picture  of  the  good  priest  and  the 
portraits  of  the  little  Cardinals  are  the  work 
of  the  same  hand,  plainly  enough.  In  both 
of  these  books,  as  in  '  Criquette '  (M.  Halevy's 
only  other  novel),  as  in  *A  Marriage  for  Love ' 
and  the  two-score  other  short  stories  he  has 
written  during  the  past  thirty  years,  there  are 
the  same  artistic  qualities,  the  same  sharpness 
of  vision,  the  same  gentle  irony,  the  same  con- 
structive skill,  and  the  same  dramatic  touch. 
It  is  to  be  remembered  always  that  the  author 
of  the  *  Abbe  Constantin  '  is  also  the  half- 
author  of  *  Froufrou '  and  of  '  Tricoche  et  Ca- 
colet,*  as  well  as  of  the  librettos  of  the  '  Belle 
Helene '  and  of  the  '  Grande  Duchesse  de 
Gerolstein.* 

In  the  two  novels,  as  in  the  two-score  short 
stories  and  sketches — the  contes  and  the  nou- 
velles  which  are  now  spring-like  idyls  and  now 
wintry  episodes,  now  sombre  etching  and  now 
gayly  colored  pastels — in  all  the  works  of  the 
story-teller  we  see  the  firm  grasp  of  the  dram- 
atist. The  characters  speak  for  themselves; 
each  reveals  himself  with  the  swift  directness 
of  the  personages  of  a  play.  They  are  not 
talked  about  and  about,  for  all  analysis  has 


THE  SHORT   STORIES   OF  M.  LUDOVIC    HAL^VY    273 

been  done  by  the  playwright  before  he  rings 
up  the  curtain  in  the  first  paragraph.  And 
the  story  unrolls  itself,  also,  as  rapidly  as 
does  a  comedy.  The  movement  is  straight- 
forward. There  is  the  cleverness  and  the  in- 
genuity of  the  accomplished  dramatist,  but  the 
construction  has  the  simplicity  of  the  high- 
est skill.  The  arrangement  of  incidents  is  so 
artistic  that  it  seems  inevitable;  and  no  one 
is  ever  moved  to  wonder  whether  or  not  the 
tale  might  have  been  better  told  in  different 
fashion. 

Nephew  of  the  composer  of '  La  Juive ' — an 
opera  not  now  heard  as  often  as  it  deserves, 
perhaps — and  son  of  a  playwright  no  one  of 
whose  productions  now  survives,  M.  Hal^vy 
grew  up  in  the  theatre.  At  fourteen  he  was  on 
the  free-list  of  the  Opera,  the  Opera  Comique, 
and  the  Odeon.  After  he  left  school  and  went 
into  the  civil  service  his  one  wish  was  to  write 
plays,  and  so  to  be  able  to  afford  to  resign 
his  post.  In  the  civil  service  he  had  an  inside 
view  of  French  politics,  which  gave  him  a  dis- 
taste for  the  mere  game  of  government  with- 
out in  any  way  impairing  the  vigor  of  his  pa- 
triotism— as  is  proved  by  certain  of  the  short 
stories  dealing  with  the  war  of  1870  and  the 
revolt  of  the  Paris  Communists.     And  while 


274  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

he  did  his  work  faithfully,  he  had  spare  hours 
to  give  to  literature.  He  wrote  plays  and 
stories,  and  they  were  rejected.  The  manager 
of  the  Odeon  declared  that  one  early  play  of 
M.  Halevy's  was  exactly  suited  to  the  Gym- 
nase,  and  the  manager  of  the  Gymnase  pro- 
tested that  it  was  exactly  suited  to  the  Odeon. 
The  editor  of  a  daily  journal  said  that  one 
early  tale  of  M.  Halevy's  was  too  brief  for  a 
novel,  and  the  editor  of  a  weekly  paper  said 
that  it  was  too  long  for  a  short  story. 

In  time,  of  course,  his  luck  turned ;  he  had 
plays  performed  and  stories  published  ;  and  at 
last  he  met  M.  Henri  Meilhac,  and  entered  on 
that  collaboration  of  nearly  twenty  years'  du- 
ration to  which  we  owe  *  Froufrou  '  and  *  Tri- 
coche  et  Cacolet '  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the 
other  the  books  of  Offenbach's  most  brilliant 
operas — *  Barbebleue,'  for  example,  and  '  La 
Perichole.'  When  this  collaboration  termi- 
nated, shortly  before  M.  Halevy  wrote  the 
*  Abbe  Constantin,'  he  gave  up  writing  for  the 
stage.  The  training  of  the  playwright  he  could 
not  give  up,  if  he  would,  nor  the  intimacy  with 
the  manners  and  customs  of  the  people  who 
live,  move,  and  have  their  being  on  the  far  side 
of  the  curtain. 

Obviously  M.  Halevy  is  fond  of  the  actors 


THE   SHORT  STORIES   OF  M.  LUDOVIC   HAhtVY    275 

and  the  actresses  with  whom  he  spent  the  years 
of  his  manhood.  They  appear  again  and  again 
in  his  tales  ;  and  in  his  treatment  of  them  there 
is  never  anything  ungentlemanly,  as  there  was 
in  M.  Jean  Richepin's  volume  of  theatrical 
sketches.  M.  Halevy's  liking  for  the  men 
and  women  of  the  stage  is  deep ;  and  wide  is 
his  knowledge  of  their  changing  moods.  The 
young  Criquette  and  the  old  Karikari  and  the 
aged  Dancing -master  —  he  knows  them  all 
thoroughly,  and  he  likes  them  heartily,  and  he 
sympathizes  with  them  cordially.  Indeed,  no- 
where can  one  find  more  kindly  portraits  of  the 
kindly  player-folk  than  in  the  writings  of  this 
half-author  of  *  Froufrou  * ;  it  is  as  though  the 
successful  dramatist  felt  ever  grateful  towards 
the  partners  of  his  toil,  the  companions  of  his 
struggles.  He  is  not  blind  to  their  manifold 
weaknesses,  nor  is  he  the  dupe  of  their  easy 
emotionalism,  but  he  is  tolerant  of  their  fail- 
ings, and  towards  them,  at  least,  his  irony  is 
never  mordant. 

Irony  is  one  of  M.  Halevy's  chief  character- 
istics, perhaps  the  chiefest.  It  is  gentle  when 
he  deals  with  the  people  of  the  stage  —  far 
gentler  then  than  when  he  is  dealing  with  the 
people  of  society,  with  fashionable  folk,  with 
the  aristocracy  of  wealth.     When  he  is  telling 


276  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

US  of  the  young  loves  of  millionaires  and  of 
million-heiresses,  his  touch  may  seem  caressing, 
but  for  all  its  softness  the  velvet  paw  has  claws 
none  the  less.  It  is  amusing  to  note  how  often 
M.  Halevy  has  chosen  to  tell  the  tale  of  love 
among  the  very  rich.  The  heroine  of  the 
*  Abbe  Constantin '  is  immensely  wealthy,  as 
we  all  know,  and  immensely  wealthy  are  the 
heroines  of  '  Princesse,*  of  'A  Grand  Marriage,* 
and  of  *  In  the  Express.*  Sometimes  the  heroes 
and  the  heroines  are  not  only  immensely 
wealthy,  they  are  also  of  the  loftiest  birth ; 
such,  for  instance,  are  the  young  couple  whose 
acquaintance  we  make  in  '  Only  a  Waltz.* 

There  is  no  trace  or  taint  of  snobbery  in  M. 
Halevy 's  treatment  of  all  this  magnificence; 
there  is  none  of  the  vulgarity  which  marks  the 
pages  of  *  Lothair,'  for  example ;  there  is  no 
mean  admiration  of  mean  things.  There  is, 
on  the  other  hand,  no  bitterness  of  scourging 
satire.  He  lets  us  see  that  all  this  luxury  is  a 
little  cloying,  and  perhaps  not  a  little  enervat- 
ing. He  suggests  (although  he  takes  care  never 
to  say  it)  that  perhaps  wealth  and  birth  are  not 
really  the  best  the  world  can  offer.  The  amia- 
ble egotism  of  the  hero  of  '  In  the  Express,' 
and  the  not  unkindly  selfishness  of  the  heroine 
of  that  most  Parisian  love-story,  are  set  before 


THE   SHORT   STORIES   OF  M.  LUDOVIC    HALEVY    277 

US  without  insistence,  it  is  true,  but  with  an 
irony  so  keen  that  even  he  who  runs  as  he 
reads  may  not  mistake  the  author's  real  opinion 
of  the  characters  he  has  evoked. 

To  say  this  is  to  say  that  M.  Halevy's  irony 
is  delicate  and  playful.  There  is  no  harshness 
in  his  manner  and  no  hatred  in  his  mind.  We 
do  not  find  in  his  pages  any  of  the  pessimism 
which  is  perhaps  the  dominant  characteristic 
of  the  best  French  fiction  of  our  time.  To 
M.  Hal^vy,  as  to  every  thinking  man,  life  is 
serious,  no  doubt,  but  it  need  not  be  taken 
sadly,  or  even  solemnly.  To  him  life  seems 
still  enjoyable,  as  it  must  to  most  of  those  who 
have  a  vivid  sense  of  humor.  He  is  not  dis- 
illusioned utterly,  he  is  not  reduced  to  the 
blankness  of  despair  as  are  so  many  of  the 
disciples  of  Flaubert,  who  are  cast  into  the 
outer  darkness,  and  who  hopelessly  revolt 
against  the  doom  they  have  brought  on  them- 
selves. 

Indeed,  it  is  M^rim^e  that  M.  Hal^vy  would 
hail  as  his  master,  and  not  Flaubert,  whom 
most  of  his  fellow  French  writers  of  fiction 
follow  blindly.  Now,  while  the  author  of 
*  Salammbo  *  was  a  romanticist  turned  sour, 
the  author  of  '  Carmen '  was  a  sentimentalist 
sheathed  in  irony.     To  Gustave  Flaubert  the 


278  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

world  was  hideously  ugly,  and  he  wished  it 
strangely  and  splendidly  beautiful,  and  he  de- 
tested it  the  more  because  of  his  impossible 
ideal.  To  Prosper  M^rim^e  the  world  was 
what  it  is,  to  be  taken  and  made  the  best  of, 
every  man  keeping  himself  carefully  guarded. 
Like  M^rim^e,  M.  Halevy  is  detached,  but  he 
is  not  disenchanted.  His  work  is  more  joyous 
than  Merim^e's,  if  not  so  vigorous  and  com- 
pact, and  his  delight  in  it  is  less  disguised. 
Even  in  the  Cardinal  sketches  there  is  noth- 
ing that  leaves  an  acrid  after -taste,  nothing 
corroding  —  as  there  is  not  seldom  in  the 
stronger  and  sterner  short  stories  of  Maupas- 
sant. 

More  than  Maupassant  or  Flaubert  or  M^ri- 
m^e  is  M.  Halevy  a  Parisian.  Whether  or  not 
the  characters  of  his  tale  are  dwellers  in  the 
capita],  whether  or  not  the  scene  of  his  story 
is  laid  in  the  city  by  the  Seine,  the  point  of 
view  is  always  Parisian.  The  Circus  Charger 
did  his  duty  in  the  stately  avenues  of  a  noble 
country  place,  and  Blacky  performed  his  task 
near  a  rustic  waterfall ;  but  the  men  who  record 
their  intelligent  actions  are  Parisians  of  the 
strictest  sect.  Even  in  the  patriotic  pieces 
called  forth  by  the  war  of  1870,  in  the  '  Insur- 
gent '  and  in  the '  Chinese  Ambassador,'  it  is  the 


THE   SHORT  STORIES   OF  M.  LUDOVIC   HALfiVY    279 

siege  of  Paris  and  the  struggle  of  the  Commu- 
nists which  seem  to  the  author  most  important. 
His  style  even,  his  swift  and  limpid  prose — the 
prose  which  somehow  corresponds  to  the  best 
vers  de  socUte  in  its  brilliancy  and  buoyancy — 
is  the  style  of  one  who  lives  at  the  centre  of 
things.  Cardinal  Newman  once  said  that  while 
Livy  and  Tacitus  and  Terence  and  Seneca 
wrote  Latin,  Cicero  wrote  Roman;  so  while 
M.  Zola  on  the  one  side,  and  M.  Georges  Ohnet 
on  the  other,  may  write  French,  M.  Hal^vy 
writes  Parisian. 

(1893.) 


V.-MR.    CHARLES    DUDLEY    WARNER    AS    A 
WRITER  OF  FICTION 

The  late  Matthew  Arnold  had  a  far  wider 
outlook  than  any  of  his  contemporaries  among 
British  critics,  but  none  the  less  was  he  ca- 
pable of  insularity  on  occasion,  as  when  he 
made  his  taunting  remark  about  the  people  of 
the  United  States  reading  the  works  of  "  a 
native  author  named  Roe"  rather  than  the 
masterpieces  of  literature — the  remark  being 
made  at  the  very  moment  when  the  people 
of  Great  Britain  were  reading  the  works  of  a 
native  author  named  Haggard,  when  the  peo- 
ple of  France  were  reading  the  works  of  a 
native  author  named  Ohnet,  and  when  the 
people  of  Germany  were  reading  the  works 
of  a  native  author  named  "  Marlitt."  And 
yet  a  few  years  before  the  distinguished  critic 
sneered  thus  inexpensively  at  this  transient 
failing  of  ours,  which  happened  to  have  at 
the  time  an  equivalent  in  every  other  coun- 
try, there  was   another   American    weakness 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER   AS   A  WRITER   OF    FICTION     28 1 

at  which  he  could  have  girded  more  effec- 
tively. This  weakness  was  an  uneasy  desire 
for  a  strange  and  portentous  work  of  fic- 
tion which  was  to  be  hailed  at  once,  on  its 
appearance,  as  The  Great  American  Novel. 
The  satirist  would  have  had  a  fair  target  in 
this  parochial  expectancy  of  the  impossible. 
How  should  there  ever  be  so  monstrous  an 
entity  as  The  Great  American  Novel  ?  Is 
there  such  a  thing  as  The  Great  British 
Novel,  or  The  Great  French  Novel  ?  And 
if  there  is,  what  is  the  name  thereof,  and 
who  proclaimed  and  proved  its  unique  great- 
ness? 

It  is  pleasant  to  observe  that  this  silly 
demand  for  an  impossible  object,  frequent 
enough  when  we  had  no  novelists,  or  very 
few,  has  died  away  now  that  we  have  a  com- 
pact corps  of  trained  writers  of  fiction  —  a 
corps  in  which  promising  recruits  are  enlisted 
almost  every  month.  These  conscripts  in 
story-telling  are  often  veterans  in  other  divis- 
ions of  the  literary  body  ;  and  they  are  drawn 
especially  from  the  rapidly  thinning  ranks  of 
the  essayists.  It  may  be  doubted  whether 
the  historians  of  literature  have  hitherto  paid 
sufficient  attention  to  the  strong  influence  of 
the  English  essayists  upon  the  development 


282  ASPECTS   OF    FICTION 

of  the  English  novel.  Addison  and  Steele 
made  the  way  straight  for  Henry  Fielding  and 
for  Jane  Austen.  '  Rasselas '  and  the  '  Vicar 
of  Wakefield  '  are  simply  numbers  of  the  Ram- 
bler and  of  the  Citizen  of  the  World  somewhat 
expanded.  So  Curtis,  after  the  '  Potiphar 
Papers,'  wrote  *  Prue  and  I '  and  *  Trumps  * ; 
so  Mr.  Howells,  after  '  Suburban  Sketches,* 
set  out  on  *  Their  Wedding  Journey '  and 
formed  *  A  Chance  Acquaintance ';  so  Mr. 
Charles  Dudley  Warner,  after  spending  a 
*  Summer  in  a  Garden,*  and  after  making  a 
series  of  *  Back-Log  Studies,'  went  away  also 
on  *  Their  Pilgrimage,'  and  took  part  in  *  A 
Little  Journey  in  the  World.' 

It  was  Moore  who  pointed  out  in  his  me- 
moir of  Sheridan  that  English  comedy  had 
been  the  work  of  very  young  men — which 
would  tend  to  account  for  its  vivacity,  per- 
haps, and  for  its  immaturity  also.  That  the 
novelists  of  our  language  have,  on  the  con- 
trary, flowered  later  in  life,  more  often  than 
not,  has  also  been  noted  before  now.  Richard- 
son was  fifty  when  he  celebrated  the  triumph 
of  virtue  in  '  Pamela ' ;  Fielding  was  thirty- 
five  when  he  made  fun  of  poor  Pamela  by 
giving  her  a  brother,  'Joseph  Andrews'; 
Scott   was    forty    when    he    finally    finished 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER   AS   A  WRITER   OF  FICTION    283 

*  Waverley  ' ;  Thackeray  did  not  begin  *  Van- 
ity Fair,'  and  George  Eliot  did  not  sketch 
the  first  of  her  '  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life,'  until 
they  had  reached  one-half  of  the  allotted  limit 
of  threescore  years  and  ten  ;  and  Mr.  Howells 
was  about  the  same  age  when  he  took  his 
first  timid  flight  in  fiction  with  *  Their  Wed- 
ding Journey.'  Mr.  Warner  was  older  than 
Richardson  when  he  turned  story-teller  and 
wrote  the  fascinating  journal  of  *  Their  Pil- 
grimage,* and  he  was  full  sixty  when  he  fol- 
lowed this  travel  tale  with  a  full-fledged  novel, 
*A  Little  Journey  in  the  World.'  Like  Field- 
ing and  Scott,  like  Thackeray  and  Mr.  How- 
ells, Mr.  Warner  had  made  proof  of  his  liter- 
ary faculty  long  before  he  ventured  into  the 
doubtful  labyrinth  of  fiction,  wherein  the  most 
accomplished  man  of  letters  may  lose  his  way 
if  he  cannot  keep  a  firm  grasp  of  the  thread 
of  interest,  the  only  clew  which  can  guide  him 
and  his  readers  to  a  joyful  safety. 

It  is  characteristic  of  Mr.  Warner's  modesty 
that  even  now,  when  he  has  come  to  his  re- 
ward, when  he  has  made  a  hit  as  a  humorist, 
when  he  has  been  welcomed  as  a  writer  of 
travels,  when  he  has  won  a  place  for  himself 
in  the  front  rank  of  essayists,  when  he  has 
appeared  thrice  as  a  novelist,  that  he  is  wont 


284  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

to  speak  of  himself  not  as  a  man  of  letters, 
but  as  a  journalist.  His  career  has  the  unex- 
pectedness to  be  discovered  in  the  lives  of  so 
many  energetic  Americans  who  set  out  in  one 
direction  and  then  go  suddenly  in  another — 
reaching  their  original  goal  in  the  end,  it  may 
be,  but  only  after  a  circumnavigation  of  the 
globe.  Born  in  Massachusetts  in  1829,  grad- 
uating from  Hamilton  in  185 1,  he  lived  on 
the  frontier  for  a  year  or  two,  and  then  studied 
law  at  the  University  of  Pennsylvania  —  al- 
though I  must  confess  that  the  critic  who  sits 
in  the  Editor's  Study  does  not  look  in  the 
least  like  the  "  Philadelphia  lawyer  "  of  popu- 
lar fancy.  He  practised  law  in  Chicago  until 
i860,  when  he  went  to  Hartford  to  take  charge 
of  a  paper  since  consolidated  with  the  Courant 
(in  which  Mr.  Warner  is  still  interested). 

It  was  in  the  spring  of  1870  that  Mr.  Warner 
began  to  contribute  to  the  Courant  a  series  of 
papers  chronicling  the  experiences  and  the  mis- 
adventures of  an  amateur  gardener.  Amusing 
as  these  little  essays  were,  they  had  none  of 
the  *' acrobatic  comedy"  (as  it  has  been  called) 
of  the  ordinary  newspaper  funny  man,  who 
has  his  easily  learned  formulas  for  extracting 
laughs.  The  humor  of  Mr.  Warner's  record 
of  his    tribulations   in    the   garden   was    not 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER   AS   A  WRITER   OF    FICTION    285 

machine-made;  it  was  original,  individual, 
delicate,  playful,  and  at  bottom  thoughtful ; 
it  was  the  easy  fooling  of  a  gentleman  and  a 
scholar.  It  happened  to  hit  the  popular  taste, 
and  the  successive  papers  were  copied  far  and 
wide,  and  quoted  and  talked  about,  and  finally 
gathered  into  a  book,  for  which  Henry  Ward 
Beecher  wrote  a  preface — omitted  from  the 
later  editions  now  that  Mr.  Warner  has  ceased 
to  need  an  introduction.  *  My  Summer  in  a 
Garden '  was  popular  not  only  in  the  United 
States  but  in  Great  Britain  as  well,  where, 
indeed,  three  rival  publishers  showed  their 
appreciation  by  reprinting  it  promptly.  One 
of  these  gentry  even  changed  the  title  and 
chose  to  call  the  little  book  *  Pusley ' ;  but 
no  one  of  the  three  thought  it  needful  to 
transmit  any  pecuniary  honorarium  to  the 
American  author,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  it 
was  even  then  possible  to  make  transfers  of 
money  by  the  Atlantic  cable. 

After  the  success  of  '  My  Summer  in  a 
Garden,'  the  author  bound  up  in  a  book  a 
selection  of  *  Saunterings,'  an  apt  title  for 
sketches  of  travel.  Then  he  wrote  a  series  of 
*  Back -Log  Studies,*  suggested  possibly  by 
the  'Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table,'  and 
possibly  by  the  *  Reveries  of  a  Bachelor,'  and 


286  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

possibly  owing  nothing  to  either  of  these,  for 
it  was  full  of  what  we  now  know  to  be  the 
flavor  of  Mr.  Warner's  own  personality.  The 
first  requisite  of  an  essayist,  the  one  thing 
needful,  without  which  he  is  as  nothing,  is  to 
have  his  own  point  of  view,  to  own  himself, 
to  be  his  own  master.  The  artist,  so  Goethe 
tells  us,  "  make  what  contortions  he  will,  can 
bring  to  light  only  his  own  individuality"; 
Mr.  Warner  is  no  literary  contortionist,  and 
it  is  without  violence  or  wrench  that  he  brings 
his  individuality  to  light.  The  more  amusing 
side  of  this  individuality  had  been  shown  in 

*  My  Summer  in  a  Garden,*  and  it  was  rather 
the  deeper  aspect  which  was  first  revealed  in 

*  Back-Log  Studies,'  wherein  the  wit  and  the 
humor  flame  up  and  crackle  and  sparkle, 
while  the  thought  beneath  glows  and  burns 
steadily. 

Probably  Mr.  Warner  himself  would  not  ap- 
prove of  any  suggestion  that  all  his  various  writ- 
ings, his  editorial  articles,  his  essays,  his  books 
of  travels,  his  biographies,  his  social  studies — 
or  at  least  such  of  them  as  had  appeared  be- 
fore 1886 — were  merely  preparations  for  their 
author's  first  venture  into  fiction.  But  cer- 
tainly, and  whatever  their  value  may  be  in 
other  respects,  they  were  each  in  its  different 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER  AS  A   WRITER   OF   FICTION    287 

degree  advantageous  to  him  when  he  took  up 
the  new  art  of  story-telling.  In  writing  them 
Mr.  Warner  had  trained  his  eye  and  his  hand  ; 
he  had  proved  his  weapons,  and  he  had  meas- 
ured himself.  The  change  of  the  essayist  into 
the  novelist  was  a  slow  development,  and  not 
a  sudden  expansion,  as  had  been  the  change 
of  the  lawyer  into  the  journalist  a  quarter  of 
a  century  before.  He  could  not  but  be  aware 
that  he  had  the  literary  faculty  in  a  high  de- 
gree; it  remained  to  be  seen  whether  he  had 
also  the  gift  of  story-telling,  without  which 
the  novelist  is  as  naught. 

It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  this  crucial 
question  is  answered  in  *  Their  Pilgrimage.' 
In  this  first  attempt  Mr.  Warner  was  diffident 
and  modest.     While  there  is  more  incident  in 

*  Their  Pilgrimage*  than  there  was  in  Curtis's 
first  attempt  at  fiction,  the  *  Potiphar  Papers,' 
and  more  even  than  there  is  in  Mr.  Howells's 

*  Their  Wedding  Journey,'  still  the  book  is 
hardly  to  be  classed  among  novels,  unless,  in- 
deed, there  were  a  separate  division  for  topo- 
graphic fiction.  It  is  the  record  of  a  voyage 
of  discovery  among  the  American  summer 
resorts,  extending  from  Bar  Harbor  to  the 
White  Sulphur,  and  including  Saratoga  and 
Long  Branch,  Newport  and  Narragansett  Pier 


288  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

and  Niagara.  It  was  natural  that  the  essayist 
turning  novelist  should  be  a  portrayer  of  social 
conditions  rather  than  a  story-teller,  pure  and 
simple.  He  has  a  story  to  tell,  of  course  (he 
is  no  needy  knife-grinder),  and  he  tells  it  well, 
bringing  the  hero  to  the  proposal  promptly, 
and  allowing  the  heroine  the  cherished  privi- 
lege of  self-sacrifice  ;  but  none  the  less  are 
we  allowed  to  guess  that  the  shifting  pano- 
rama is  almost  as  interesting  as  are  the  fig- 
ures making  love  in  the  foreground.  Now  and 
again,  as  is  the  duty  of  the  essayist,  he  lets  us 
catch  a  glimpse  of  his  own  individuality,  not 
suppressing  it  vigorously,  as  is  the  wont  of  the 
most  advanced  story-tellers  of  to-day. 

But  still,  the  book  "  lets  itself  be  read,"  to 
use  the  useful  German  phrase.  However  slight 
as  a  story,  it  is  delightful  as  the  work  of  an 
accomplished  man  of  letters,  deftly  sketching 
a  bit  of  scenery  here  and  adroitly  outlining  a 
bit  of  character  there.  And  especially  does  it 
abound  in  good  talk — in  good  talk  which  is 
not  merely  a  sequence  of  clever  phrases,  but 
really  talky  with  the  flavor  of  give  and  take, 
to  and  fro,  hit  or  miss,  cut  and  thrust,  which 
is  the  essence  of  friendly  conversation.  The 
late  Lord  Houghton  declared  that  "  good  con- 
versation is  to  ordinary  talk  what   whist  is 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER   AS   A  WRITER   OF    FICTION    289 

to  playing  cards";  and  Mr.  Warner  has  here 
proved  himself  a  most  expert  whist  -  player, 
with  the  fullest  understanding  of  American 
leads.  "A  man  always  talks  badly  who  has 
nothing  to  say,"  Voltaire  remarked  ;  but  it 
does  not  follow  that  the  reverse  is  true,  and 
that  the  man  who  has  something  to  say  is 
sure  to  talk  well.  Mr.  Warner  and  Mr.  War- 
ner's companions  in  *  Their  Pilgrimage '  have 
always  something  to  say,  and  something  to 
which  the  reader  is  delighted  to  listen  ;  and 
they  say  it  in  such  fashion  as  to  make  conver- 
sation seem  the  very  cream  of  culture. 

In  *  Their  Pilgrimage '  Mr.  Warner  showed 
that  he  had  a  firm  grasp  of  the  essential  facts 
of  American  life  and  character ;  in  *  A  Little 
Journey  in  the  World '  he  revealed  that  he  had 
also  mastered  the  art  of  fiction,  and  was  able 
to  fix  the  reader's  attention  not  on  the  scenery 
and  the  chorus  which  had  amused  us  in  the 
earlier  book,  but  on  the  characters  of  the  men 
and  women,  and  on  the  influence  of  these 
characters  one  on  the  other.  He  had  turned 
from  the  externals  of  existence  to  the  internals. 
He  had  thrust  the  panorama  into  the  back- 
ground and  concentrated  his  attention  on  the 
figures  in  the  foreground.  And  these  figures 
are  well  worthy  of  his  attention  and  of  ours. 


290  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

He  groups  together  the  delicate,  sensitive  New 
England  girl  of  high  ideals  and  the  rather 
common  but  clever  New  York  girl — of  a  kind 
seen  in  the  city  often  enough,  and  yet  not  at 
all  a  typical  New  York  girl,  if  such  an  entity 
may  be  said  to  exist.  He  shows  us  a  new 
variety  of  the  English  lord  whom  it  is  the  duty 
of  the  American  girl  to  reject ;  and  he  makes 
us  see  what  a  fine  fellow  the  Englishman  is, 
and  what  a  mistake  the  girl  makes  in  accept- 
ing, instead  of  his,  the  love  of  a  Wall  Street 
speculator,  handsome,  bold,  scheming,  and  un- 
scrupulous. And  here  it  is  that  Mr.  Warner 
proves  at  once  his  insight  into  life  and  his 
newly  acquired  skill  as  a  story  -  teller ;  he 
makes  us  see  and  understand,  and  even  accept 
as  inevitable,  the  slow  process  of  deterioration 
which  follows  on  the  mating  of  a  young  woman 
of  lofty  standards  with  a  dominating  character 
of  coarser  and  tougher  substance.  The  disin- 
tegration of  Margaret's  moral  fibre  under  the 
repeated  shocks  of  worldliness,  incessantly  re- 
curring, until  at  last  the  strain  breaks  down  all 
resistance,  seems  to  me  one  of  the  finest  things 
in  recent  American  literature. 

At  the  end  of  'A  Little  Journey  in  the 
World,'  the  gentle  Margaret,  after  wedding 
the  daring  speculator  Henderson,  had  suffer- 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER  AS   A  WRITER   OF    FICTION    29 1 

ed  a  slow  moral  disintegration,  under  which 
she  finally  faded  away  and  died,  whereupon 
the  swift  vengeance  of  Heaven  pursued  Hen- 
derson, and  the  book  closes  with  his  marriage 
to  the  easy-going  Carmen.  That  these  two 
characters,  thus  fitly  disposed  of  in  '  A  Little 
Journey  in  the  World,'  should  reappear  in  the 
*  Golden  House  *  is  a  surprise,  not  to  say  a 
shock,  and  yet  it  must  be  confessed  that  the 
result  justifies  Mr.  Warner's  daring.  We  can 
see  now  that  the  author  was  right  in  thinking 
that  the  career  of  Henderson,  and  also  the 
career  of  his  second  wife,  might  be  carried 
further  with  advantage.  Henderson's  career, 
indeed,  the  author  has  seen  fit  to  carry  out 
to  the  end — to  his  sudden  and  lonely  death 
in  the  midst  of  his  millions. 

Of  all  the  many  attempts  to  represent  in  fic- 
tion the  American  money-maker,  the  man  who 
has  amassed  an  immense  fortune,  and  who  goes 
on  increasing  it  with  no  thought  of  resting  from 
his  labor,  the  man  who  exists  solely  for  the  sake 
of  making  money,  surrendering  all  tastes  that 
interfere  with  this  passion,  giving  up  every- 
thing else,  abandoning  his  whole  life  to  gain, 
and  not  from  any  sordid  avarice,  not  even  from 
any  great  desire  to  use  what  he  accumulates, 
but  moved  mainly  by  an  interest  in  the  sport 


292  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

of  speculation,  and  finding  the  zest  of  his  life 
in  the  game  of  money-making,  wholly  regard- 
less of  the  cash  value  of  the  stakes — of  all  the 
many  efforts  to  put  such  a  man  before  us  in  the 
pages  of  a  novel,  this  study  of  Mr.  Warner's 
seems  to  me  to  be  the  most  successful,  Hen- 
derson is  vigorously  presented,  and  we  get  to 
know  him,  and  to  understand  how  it  is  that  he 
is  not  unkindly,  and  that  he  is  absolutely  un- 
scrupulous. We  perceive  why  he  has  no  malice 
towards  those  he  injured  by  his  scheming,  and 
why  he  bears  them  no  ill  will  even  after  he  has 
ruined  them.  We  see  how  all  the  better  im- 
pulses of  the  man  have  been  starved  and  choked 
by  the  growth  of  the  one  all-absorbing  passion  ; 
and  it  is  not  without  pity  that  we  discover  that 
not  only  his  impulses,  but  his  tastes,  his  minor 
interests  in  life,  his  faculty  of  enjoyment,  have 
been  eliminated,  one  by  one,  until  at  last  he 
has  nothing  left  but  the  one  thing  on  which 
he  has  set  his  heart,  and  to  which  he  has  bent 
his  whole  being.  Then  at  length  even  this 
one  thing  loses  its  savor,  and  is  as  dust  and 
ashes  in  his  mouth.  At  the  very  acme  and 
climax  of  his  triumph  Henderson  knows  that 
his  life  has  been  a  failure. 

This  boldly  projected  figure  of  Henderson 
dominates  the  book  as  his  exemplars  tower 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER   AS    A  WRITER   OF    FICTION    293 

aloft  over  the  social  organization  of  our  time. 
In  our  modern  society  the  millionaire  has  in 
great  measure  taken  the  place  held  aforetime 
by  the  nobleman  ;  and  it  may  very  well  be  that 
we  allow  him  to  enjoy  too  many  of  the  feudal 
advantages  of  his  predecessor.  Perhaps  Mr. 
Kldd  is  right  in  thinking  that  we  are  according 
to  captains  of  industry  an  undue  proportion  of 
the  powers  and  of  the  honors  which  were  for- 
merly bestowed  rightly  enough  on  command- 
ers in  war.  One  of  the  merits  of  the  *  Golden 
House'  is  that  it  forces  the  reader  to  take 
thought  about  society.  The  book  is  no  tract, 
no  parable,  no  allegory,  no  Tendenz-Roman  even, 
as  the  Germans  phrase  it,  no  novel  with  a  pur- 
pose ;  it  is  a  story,  pure  and  simple,  with  strong- 
ly drawn  characters,  in  whose  sayings  and  do- 
ings we  are  interested  for  their  own  sakes ;  but 
none  the  less  even  the  casual  reader  who  turns 
its  pages  carelessly  has  forced  upon  him  a  con- 
sciousness that  our  social  system  is  strangely 
inadequate  and  startlingly  imperfect. 

Perhaps  nothing  is  more  harmful  to-day  than 
the  frequent  denunciations  of  the  existing  order 
of  things  with  the  obvious  inference  that  a  so- 
ciety so  deformed  needs  to  be  rooted  up  and 
cleared  away  and  made  over.  What  ought  to 
be  clear  to  us  is  that,  with  all  the  defects  of 


294  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

the  social  organization  in  our  time,  this  organ- 
ization is  less  defective  than  it  ever  was  before ; 
that  there  has  been  steady  progress  in  the 
world  from  generation  to  generation ;  that 
there  has  been  no  century  in  which  the  aver- 
age man  has  not  been  better  off  than  he  was 
in  the  previous  century ;  that  it  is  our  duty 
to  do  all  that  in  us  lies  to  help  forward  this 
progress;  and  that  nothing  tends  to  retard 
this  improvement  more  than  violent  and  in- 
flammatory declamation.  The  pessimist  who 
refuses  to  believe  in  any  advance  is  quite  as 
wrong  as  the  optimist  who  denies  that  there  is 
any  necessity  for  a  forward  movement.  Now, 
as  always,  discontent  is  a  duty,  for  it  is  a  con- 
dition precedent  to  progress.  It  is  not  dis- 
content that  throws  the  dynamite  bomb  ;  it  is 
despair. 

While  Mr.  Warner's  novel  is  the  work  of  a 
thinker,  and  while  it  affords  food  for  thought 
even  to  the  cursory  reader,  it  is  wholly  free 
from  denunciation.  By  its  perusal  we  are  led 
not  to  wish  to  destroy  society,  but  rather  to 
desire  its  reorganization  ;  and  we  are  made  at 
least  to  suspect  the  complexity  of  the  problem. 
Mr.  Warner  shows  us  the  poor  as  well  as  the 
rich — Mulberry  Bend  after  Madison  Avenue — 
and  he  does  not  idealize  the  one  more  than  the 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER   AS    A  WRITER   OF    FICTION    291; 

other.  Perhaps,  after  all,  the  pinch  of  poverty- 
does  not  squeeze  the  soul  more  than  the  weight 
of  riches — although  it  numbs  the  body  sooner. 

It  is  poverty  that  saves  Jack  Delancy,  who  is 
perhaps  to  be  called  the  hero  of  the  *  Golden 
House,*  and  who  is  certainly  a  most  skilful 
piece  of  portraiture.  We  all  know  Jack ;  he  is 
the  clever  young  fellow,  moving  easily  through 
life  along  the  line  of  least  resistance,  and  hav- 
ing no  shadows  in  his  path  except  when  he 
stands  in  his  own  light.  If  such  a  young  man 
has  had  the  good  fortune  to  be  born  poor,  he 
can  save  himself,  and  the  world  is  the  richer 
by  a  fine  fellow.  If  he  has  the  bad  luck  of 
Jack  Delancy,  and  inherits  twenty  thousand 
dollars  a  year,  he  is  not  likely  to  save  himself, 
for  ennui  is  the  devil's  advocate — and  as  Mr. 
Warner  tersely  puts  it,  "  wherever  the  devil  is, 
there  is  always  a  quorum  present  for  business." 
Even  after  Jack  marries  an  ideal  wife  his  fate 
is  in  doubt,  and  it  needs  not  only  her  aid  but 
the  sharp  douche  of  sudden  poverty  to  stimu- 
late him  into  making  the  best  of  his  life. 

As  it  is  no  fairy  tale  that  Mr.  Warner  is  writ- 
ing, he  does  not  let  Jack  reform  in  the  twink- 
ling of  an  eye,  but  only  after  a  long  struggle 
with  himself  and  his  habits ;  for  while  a  noble 
impulse  may  make  a  man  volunteer  for  a  for- 


296  ASPECTS   OF   FICTION 

lorn  hope,  only  a  firm  will  can  keep  him  stead- 
fast under  fire.  It  would  be  futile  to  wonder 
how  a  Parisian  novelist  would  have  treated  the 
relations  of  Jack  and  Carmen,  but  it  may  be 
doubted  whether  that  treatment  would  be  as 
calmly  truthful  as  Mr.  Warner's.  The  Amer- 
ican author  knew  his  type  when  he  made  Hen- 
derson conscious  that  Carmen  was  as  **  passion- 
less as  a  diamond." 

How  true  to  life  Carmen  may  be,  and  how 
accurate  Edith  Delancy,  I  do  not  know ;  for 
how  is  a  mere  man  to  decide  on  the  niceties  of 
feminine  character  ?  Every  novel  really  worth 
criticising  needs  two  critics — a  man  to  discuss 
the  male  characters,  and  a  woman  to  discuss 
the  female.  It  is  easy  enough  for  any  man  to 
say  that  the  heroes  of  many  women's  novels 
are  impossible,  for  the  most  part  either  prigs 
or  brutes ;  but  may  not  the  woman  retort  on 
us,  and  declare  the  irresistible  heroines  of  men's 
novels  equally  impossible  ?  To  us  men  Carmen 
is  coherent  and  convincing  ;  Edith  Delancy  is 
almost  flawless,  and  quite  too  good  for  that 
very  human  creature  Jack ;  Dr.  Ruth  Leigh  is 
most  sympathetically  drawn ;  but  what  do  the 
women  think  of  these  creatures  of  a  masculine 
brain?  I  can  bear  testimony  to  the  dignity 
and  the  strength  with  which  Father  Damon  is 


MR.  C.  D.  WARNER   AS   A  WRITER   OF   FICTION    297 

delineated ;  but  I  lack  the  knowledge  to  take 
the  stand  in  behalf  of  Dr.  Ruth,  who  seems  to 
me  quite  as  well  conceived,  and  quite  as  hap- 
pily presented. 

In  this  his  third  work  of  fiction  the  author 
is  more  the  master  of  the  art  than  in  the  earlier 
studies.  He  possesses  his  materials  now ;  he 
is  not  possessed  by  them.  He  keeps  his  story 
more  firmly  in  hand ;  the  construction  is  sol- 
ider;  the  movement  is  swifter;  and  there  are 
fewer  digressions  from  the  main  path.  To  a 
certain  extent  the  modern  novel  is  the  result 
of  a  marriage  of  the  essay  and  the  drama ;  and 
it  is  natural  enough  that  the  child  should  re- 
semble now  one  of  the  parents  and  now  the 
other.  In  Mr.  Warner's  hands,  as  was  to  be 
expected,  the  tendency  is  rather  towards  the 
essay,  yet  there  is  no  obtrusion  of  the  nar- 
rator's personality,  and  there  is  no  lack  of 
dramatic  force  in  certain  of  the  situations. 
In  more  than  one  of  them — in  the  parting  of 
the  doctor  and  the  priest,  for  example — there 
IS  the  swift  simplicity  of  tragedy,  inevitable, 
inexorable,  final. 

(1894.) 


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